Hi, On 19.10.2017 00:02, James wrote: > Frederik, I completely agree that OSM costs money to maintain and that > the servers will require additional disk space to hold information. But > to say give us money because you are adding a lot of geo-information to > an open source project to make it more detailed seems border line blackmail.
Let's say politics instead of blackmail ;) the whole project is going to cost Statistics Canada millions of dollars, and there will most certainly be many, many interest groups and companies who are looking for a good angle to have a little bit of that cake. Call me a cynic but when I read "A workshop was held on September 15, 2017, at Statistics Canada head office in Ottawa. The workshop was attended by 52 people from 25 organizations..." - I think that these 25 organisations are surely not all there our of sheer idealism! Many of them will already have handed in their expense reports and have been refunded for hotel and travel, while the OSMers present have probably paid everything out of their own pockets. It appears to me that OSM and its people and infrastructure play a very important part in this whole project, and I am pretty damn sure that many organisations who play a much smaller role than OSM will play, will find their ways to have Statistics Canada pay for it. If Statistics Canada chose an ESRI platform to collect and distribute their data, what do you think the bill for that would be? It would only be fair for them to divert a (very small) portion of the overall project funding directly to OSM, instead of paying only the other organisations involved and assuming that OSM is somehow free like the air you breathe. I think that if we raise awareness for the fact that while we may all work for free, our servers cost a little money too, we can get a fair share of the money, and there's absolutely nothing morally wrong with that - on the contrary, it would be morally wrong for a government to assume they can simply use OSM as a free vehicle to dispense a service to their citizens. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ Imports mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
