[OSM-talk] GeoHipster comment on OSM

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 01/05/2015, Simon Poole <simon at poole.ch> wrote:
> Am 01.05.2015 um 02:29 schrieb Nicholas G Lawrence:
>> Exactly why this is necessary is a mystery to me. If business wants to
>> make use of OSM data, they can download the planet file just like anyone
>> else. If business wants to contribute data, or donate equipment or
>> sponsor events, those things are also possible.
>
> It should be pointed out that during 2012 and 2014 and continuing with
> at least the LWG till today, dozens of companies and organisations
> (outside of the geo-industry) with questions have had no problems
> contacting the OSMF and getting an answer back, typically within less
> than 24 hours. The OSMF even has a published and working postal mail
> address (contrary to certain other organisations).

Contacting the OSMF is one thing, but for most companies the only
reason to do that is to clear a license question (which sadly come up
much more often than they should). The other reasons to want a single
point of contact is to get technical support and all kind of services,
which companies like Mapbox and Geofabrik cater for (I'm sure they can
proxy legal questions as well).

I can't help but draw a parallell between OSM and PostgreSQL, which
has the same "actual product is only owned by a community, but lots of
companies offer commercial support" structure. Nearly all other big
databases are backed by a single company, and PG regularly gets
feedback about people turned off by the lack of an official PG
company. No matter how many companies offer high quality support, and
that this setup is demonstrably better for the project as a whole,
some potential users will always be turned off.

So I feel that we don't have a problem with the current structure, but
perhaps we could present that structure better. Compare for example
http://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/ to
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Companies. Gary's "OSM for business
consortium" also has a nice ring to it (if anything, because the
members would be self-selected, it'd avoid a wiki edit war or a
complicated OSMF-led selection process).