On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 5:41 PM, SteveC <[email protected]> wrote: > Oh don't be so sensitive, Richard and I go back and forth on this all the > time. I can understand why he argues for strange monopolies given his > politcal ideals. Is that better?
It's a bit of a recurring theme on these lists though - when the discussion gets going, the personal statements come out. It's weak debating skills. > Now, why shouldn't I get free access to these maps? What is so special about > them that we ned to grant a monopoly to protect a supposedly valuable > sub-industry? I find it super weird you want a monopoly to protect industry, > but there you go. What are the companies, products or jobs that will be hurt > by it? I didn't say I wanted a monopoly. I'd rather either a) the government (i.e. the OS now, and doubly so if they stop trying to cover costs and just take subsidies instead) didn't produce printed maps at all b) or if the OS is going to produce finished maps, they spin out the cartographers and printing presses into a commercial organisation and let it sink or swim without government subsidy in competition with the like of, well, everyone else. This isn't me saying that I disapprove of a commercial company giving away a whole load of raster maps for free, I'm saying I don't think the government should be funding it. The only analogies I've thought of are if the government was to start up a department in Southampton employing authors to write novels and give them away to ebook readers, or if they paid civil-servant photographers to go round taking pictures of cats, caption them and run icanhascheezburger.gov.uk - both of which seem a bit weird and a misuse of public funds. Now I think we need a national mapping agency, since there are lots of bits of government (and society) that wouldn't work without having someone saying "this line goes here". And the kind of data that a government collects in order to have a functioning government should also be public domain. But beyond that, it's a sliding scale into competing with a whole load of organisations who could be doing it themselves. Cheers, Andy _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
