[OSM-talk] Funding of three infrastructure projects : Nominatim, osm2pgsql, Potlatch 2

Simon Poole simon at poole.ch
Sun Aug 2 10:05:09 UTC 2020


Am 02.08.2020 um 01:03 schrieb Skyler Hawthorne:
> ...
>
> Sorry if this sounds harsh, but I think using any funds at all to
> continue support for a tool that 1% of editors use would be wasteful.
> Flash is, for all intents and purposes, a dead technology. This money
> is better spent on other uses.
> ...

Extending this a bit further, you could just as well say, given that all
current and actively maintained general purpose editors require 1-2
FTEs, the OSMF should simply block all non-iD editors and tell the
developers to either work on iD or go home.

In reality things are not quite that simple,  it starts with measuring
how much use an app actually gets.

While iD outstrips JOSM substantially wrt users (JOSM has less than 10%
market share), a majority of the iD users have a very small number of
edits and are non recurring contributors. This reflects itself in the
edit counts too where the ratio is ~2/3 JOSM and 1/3 id. Naturally JOSM
-currently- tends to get used for larger edits which is likely a major
factor. Given that P2 users are mostly long time OSM contributors that
edit regularly, a similar pattern can be seen, and I think that a one
time update at the proposed cost can easily be justified.

Now medium term, that is 1-2 years, this is likely going to change
substantially. iD is branching out in to more and more niches, reducing
the breathing space for anything else massively and other editor use has
effectively been stagnating for a long time. While people will
automatically try to start listing special use cases that can "only" be
done with editor XX, the problem is that these are special cases and
unlikely to be worth spending a couple of $100k on per year (virtually
or real) for the small number of users that will remain as iD gains more
and more features.

Simon


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