On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 11:30 PM, Kai Krueger <[email protected]> wrote:
> For that reason, the tileservers on osm.org have a significant list of > user-agents that they block completely and in addition they also have an > automatic rate limiting per IP. There is also a specific tile usage > policy ( https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_usage_policy ) that > gouverns how you are allowed to technically access the tile servers > (once you have it downloaded, the use is freely gouverned by the > CC-BY-SA licence) And this is something Wikimedia should try to avoid extremely hard. Osm.org tileserver is said to be "example", "demo" and "not the real thing", and this is the line of reasoning about seriously limiting its use, basically denying every mobile app and serious user. Which is kind of logical, since OSM itself is about the database not the renderer, and it's been said several times that the tile service is a courtesy and not a real service. However Wikimedia is about serving content, not providing some demo look into a dataset. If we seriously consider providing this service (which is, if all goes well, could match the popularity of google maps; OSM use is seriosuly limited by available large-scale tile services, if there wasn't MapQuest it would be completely off limits for mere users) then we have to expect extreme loads from mobile clients. (Well, not that extreme which was detailed here: one client retrieving hundred thousands of tiles is abnormal, but a normal mobile client can retrieve a few hundred easily with large zoom and a fast moving vehicle. And there are clients with hundred thousands of users.) > Other tileservers like the opencyclemap, equally have restrictions and ...due to their very limited resources. That's one thing where WMF can be better (suited). I hope. [[user:grin]] _______________________________________________ Maps-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/maps-l
