[OSM-talk] Using OpenStreetMap on a daily basis

[Jean-Marc Liotier]

On 12/07/2013 23:14, Simon Poole wrote:
> Nobody was claiming that doing any of the above is "easy", but it is
> simply a question of organizing the necessary resources (mainly money).
> [..]
> Does the community really want to transform that to something closer to the top heavy Wikipedia model which would be a likely consequence of running a full consumer mapping site?

Given the current budget, the issue of a bold foray into the web-scale 
provision of consumer services would resolve itself quite easily : the 
unsustainable project would soon implode and revert to its stable state 
of 'core OSM'.

Sustainability is the elephant in the room, trumping even capex budget 
and developer resources.

As Saint Exupery said, perfection is attained not when there is nothing 
more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove. The question is 
not about what should be added to http://openstreetmap.org but what 
can't be done by third parties...

The mission statement of the OSMF tells it all : "running and protecting 
the OSM database, and making it available to all" 
(http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Mission_Statement). Sustainability is 
a rather strong subtext behind the whole thing.

Now why should OSM steal the application development business from 
institutions, companies, individuals and all the other sort of motivated 
entities who never needed to have their service featured on osm.org to 
run it happily ?

Do you use applications on servers run by the Linux Foundation or do you 
just take the code from them to boot the kernel on your own hosts ?