[OSM-talk] Introducing SwiftAddress, an highly efficient way of collecting housenumbers

[Simon Poole]

Am 23.01.2021 um 13:13 schrieb Yves:
>
> Le 23 janvier 2021 11:20:19 GMT+01:00, Simon Poole <simon at poole.ch> a écrit :
>> I don't quite understand why, outside of a specialized keyboard, you are
>> reinventing the wheel
> The pleasure of building something from the ground up, joy of developing an App, maybe?
> I hope you did not forgot it, Simon.
> A wealthy environment should be more welcoming to new players.
> Yves

There are

- limited edits to go around

- limited developer time to go around

- limited user interest and attention.

The more fragmented the OSM app market place the more and more difficult 
it gets to have a viable number of users, yes every new app takes away 
edits from the existing  apps (and no, the rising tide analogy does not 
apply here). At least for all non-commercially developed OSM software 
this would seem to be the only metric to indicate if investing the 
required work makes sense or not. Of the roughly 30 editing apps, only 9 
have a share of more than 1% of the total user market (roughly 3'000 
contributors in absolute numbers) and for the rest it falls off really 
quickly. And while you could admire people that carry on maintaining an 
app for 40 users, there is no denying that it doesn't make sense for OSM 
as a whole at all.

This is not an argument against change and improvements, but about 
leaving ones ego aside and investing the time and effort in to bettering 
existing applications. BTW just as I did when I decided to invest time 
in to improving an existing app, instead of creating a new one.

This doesn't apply just to editing software, it is (somewhat driven by 
the nature of OSM and historically little central software development) 
rampant all over the place, for example notoriously geocoding software 
where there seems to be at leas a couple of new entrants every year 
which then go away again just as fast.

Simon


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: OpenPGP_signature
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 495 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20210123/80c1e947/attachment.sig>