Tom Hughes wrote: >Sent: 02 May 2008 9:51 AM >To: [email protected]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Subject: Re: [OSM-dev] The future of Potlatch > >In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Richard Fairhurst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> For most purposes AS3 probably is a better language - except for the >> fairly major proviso there's no open-source player even in development. > >As far as I'm concerned this is quite a key point, although I know >that Steve disagrees with me violently on this ;-) > >In part it's an entirely selfish attitude in as much as that Adobe >show no signs of wanting to support flash on 64 bit linux which means >that I am left having to rely on the free players or struggling to >use the 32 bit flash plugin via a kludgy wrapper that barely works >at the best of times.
I believe there is the temptation to think that the project should always pamper to all of us who have grown up with it thus far, afterall, if it changed significantly from our prior experience or expectations we would probably feel more and more left and out and ultimately move on to other things. I hope that doesn't happen for any of us. However, we can't avoid the observation that the project continues to grow exponentially and as it does so, and assuming it continues to do so, the number of potential contributors and users will probably increasingly come from non opensource backgrounds. More and more will be wanting to experience OSM from the standard ibm clone box running the big corporate software offerings. So, we shouldn't leave our heads in the sand, development on all fronts should be encouraged, open source or proprietary really doesn't matter, surely the community will decide what it wishes to use. The one bit I feel strongly should not be tampered with without widespread community agreement is what happens at the database end, and that includes what should and should not be available via the API (or any additional API's that get suggested). If we want to maintain true openness then we make it clear what the API can and can't do (we already do this), be responsive to new ideas for opening up the API and provide every assistance to those developing tools that use the API. Those tools, whether they are editors, viewers, routing products, mobile phones or whatever, should in my view be allowed to develop separately from the core OSM function. This means that if there are 10 editors out there we really shouldn't favour any particular one, but make all that comply with the requirements of the API available to users. Cheers Andy _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dev
