Hi, On 29.11.2012 23:26, Richard Fairhurst wrote:
If you chaps are all dead set on doing another massive TIGER import - hey, it's your funeral
It's not a funeral. It's a sacrifice of long-term project health for a short term gain.
Nobody in the overheated IT business world makes plans for something in five years; stuff that is in planning today will launch in 2013 and be dead in 2014. Naturally, if OSM can't promise addresses for 2013 then the business world isn't interested.
OSM has a choice. We don't have to submit to commercial life cycles; we've come as far as we have without doing it and we'll grow further even if we're not doing it. We can afford to tell those who ask: Thank you, we agree that addresses are important, but we'll do it our way and this will take time.
We might miss a few opportunities that way - we might see a little less announcements about some other big player having made the "switch2osm" in the short term. We might see a couple businesses throwing together OSM and third-party addressing and try to make a viable offer from that. But we'd be doing things our way, building a strong community and a good foundation for future growth.
Or we could opt for the quick success story, for a couple more minutes of fame, import data that we haven't created, haven't even seen - essentially become a distributor of third-party datasets. Garner some headlines, give a couple smart interviews to the press about why OSM is great (when in fact the data import is admitting the failure of precisely that which is great about OSM - individuals surveying the world).
We've been ignored by the big guys long enough - and even so flourished in the shadow. Does it really hurt if we're ignored for a while longer, and slowly and steadily grow?
I'd like to think that mankind has meanwhile learned to ask the sustainability question, and certainly imports aren't sustainable.
Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
