[OSM-talk] Crossroad names

[Peter Wendorff]

Am 24.03.2013 18:38, schrieb Hans Schmidt:
> Am 24.03.2013 17:59, schrieb Kevin Peat:
>> On 24 March 2013 16:38, Tom Hughes <tom at compton.nu> wrote:
>>> What makes you think money is the problem?
>>>
>> Money could help to speed up the process by buying time which people
>> may not be able to give as a volunteer. Crowd sourcing map data works
>> great because it is fun (for OSMers at least!) but building
>> stylesheets is fun for way less people so some inducement may be
>> required.
>>
> This is exactly what I think. Although I happily map with JOSM, I have almost no idea about programming or anything more difficult. I rather invest my time into something which I am good at, and where I can earn money. I would really like to give something of that money to OSM so that other people who are good at programming can improve the page for me. Or that somebody might start to do some unpleasant work if he is compensated for that dull work with money, so that he can do something fun with it. 
> Why should I invest so much time a) learning how to program and b) learning to understand the stuff behind OSM, if somebody who already is proficient in these things can do it so much more efficient than me? 
> 
> I wonder why the monetary aspect is not more prominent in open source projects. Imo, this could solve many many problems in projects, which are stuck in their development due to lack of manpower.
> This divison of labour is the core of our economic system and it works very well. You pay a hairdresser to get your hair cut, because you do not want to or you cannot cut your hair yourself. You pay somebody to have a nice book from a foreign language translated, because it would cost you too much time to learn the language for yourself. 

And that's what's happening all the time, even around OSM.
Mapbox is paying people for their products, and some of them are out
there for the open.

The Knight foundation funds development of iD, which is and will be open
source.

The Geofabrik pays for german OSM flyers to be printed and distributed
for free to promote osm by mappers, and they pay for the extraction of
osm region datasets as well as for the traffic to provide these online.

But that's not "osm(f) pays somebody to..."

If you want to have feature X done and you're not able to do it
yourself, but you want to pay for it, go for it: find a coder, pay him
and provide patches that are easy to maintain or where the current
maintainers believe you or your coder maintain the code in future (by
your payment or without), and you might get what you want even without
coding skills.

I don't think anybody will stop patches to be introduced because their
developers have been payed by anyone to code them; but out of the same
reasons any other patch might be stopped: bad quality, no future concept
for maintenance or probably wrong direction.

Your argument might be true on the one hand: any particular issue might
be solved/any particular feature might be implemented earlier, but
what's with the hundrets of services and features around that now are
developed for free in the spare time of coders, researchers or
enthusiasts who even learn coding by trying out new things?

I understand people that do not spend time in their own (free) osm
routing service implementation, if there's a chance to get a paid job
from osmf in a couple of months - as long as nobody else is doing the
same for free up to then. I probably would prefer doing something else
first then, too.

Paying people for stuff that's really necessary is one thing. Paying
people for stuff that's wanted by some other people IMHO should be done
- if - by these people directly. The collective of osm (osmf and it's
members or even all mappers) is inhomogenous and paying for features
"dictates" a direction, makes necessary decisions that prefer one
feature over another, and I don't think that's a good idea.


regards
Peter