On 01/09/2010 15:14, Torsten Rahn wrote:
And I doubt that OSM contributors see openstreetmap.org as a nice limited "Demo Version" of what a true Free Mapping portal could look like.
Actually, that's precisely what I see it as.
My opinion is this: that openstreetmap.org is to the OpenStreetMap project what kernel.org is to the Linux Kernel project. It's the home of the project, and its where all the hard work is done, but it's not where you're expected to *use* the results.
Software and data can be copied and used by as many people as possible without the original creator bearing any more costs than their initial distribution. The same can't be said of hardware resources -- there's a finite capacity on any one machine, and adding more machines costs the OSMF more money.
What I don't want to see is OSMF get into the same situation as Wikimedia-F now finds itself with Wikipedia, where instead of being a project that creates Free content, it's an end-user web site that constantly needs to beg for money to pay for servers and people to run them. I'd rather organisations (commercial and non-commercial) took the content we're making and turned it into products, and supported those products with whatever business model they saw fit. It's how Linux works, and it appears to be sustainable so far. I haven't seen Canonical begging for money from Ubuntu users recently.
Think of it this way: If every time someone wanted to run Marble, they did it on the servers you use to create the software, would you be able to cope?
Jonathan _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
