On Mon, Jul 28, 2014 at 1:19 AM, Eric Gundersen <e...@mapbox.com> wrote: >> Let's not kid ourselves here. The overwhelming number of commercial OSM > users are not driven by a motivation to help us, but by a motivation to > save money (or perhaps a motivation to escape a monopolist's clutch but > that boils down to the same). > > Frederik, saving money is not the point, it's all about having great data > that is supported by a community. Every day I'm talking to commercial > companies interested in _paying_ Mapbox because they truly believe we have > the best map (power by OpenStreetMap), and the people at these companies > believe in a future of open data where the map continues to grow thanks to > being open. Mapbox is working with companies from foursquare to Pinterest to > the Financial Times to VK.com (https://www.mapbox.com/showcase). These few > sites alone are used by hundreds of millions of people looking at beautiful > OpenStreetMap data, and location and thus the map, is critical for each app. > Accuracy is what matters, not skimping on a few $. We have dozens of large > companies like this that would love to more tightly integrate their internal > data with OSM via goecoding, but because of unclear guidelines are blocked.
+1 Any company I'm aware of interested in OSM is not trying to save money, they're interested in the promise of better quality that you get from a community (of individuals and companies if they're welcome). In fact many companies with plenty of money are hurting for the lack of a truly global geocoder. There is no single source for this, especially outside the US. Try to find one and pay them: you can't. To be clear: OSM is far from ready to provide a high-quality global geocoder. It works pretty well in NYC and I was glad to see how well it worked in Karlsruhe :) but there's a serious lack of address data globally. So the problem is not that it's a great source of geocoding data that we're prevented from using because of licensing. The problem is that there's about to be a lot of resources, effort, and attention focused on this problem, and it would be great to do this within OSM. There are alternatives though such as OpenAddresses. Back to my original comment, if it we're 2010 and I had significant resources to invest in this problem, where would I best do it? Again -- it's fine if it's not OSM, should just come out with a strong statement from the board either way. -Randy _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
