The Orange Telecom/Wikimedia Foundation business model is one that might work for OSM too.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Orange_and_Wikimedia_announce_partnership_April_2009 Orange pay the Wikimedia Foundation a significant amount of money each year - not for permission to use the Wikipedia data (which is, of course, free) but to use the Wikipedia Logo (i.e: Orange see attribution as adding value to their product). Clearly Orange also benefit from being seen as a supporter of the Wikipedia project. The Wikimedia Foundation are on target to raise $1.75m from this sort of "partnership" 2009-2010. Clearly wikipedia is bigger and better known than OSM but it was always held up as a model for OSM. This kind of financial support is much more likely to happen if we encourage and make it easy for businesses to use OSM data. PY On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 9:43 AM, Frederik Ramm <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > paul youlten wrote: >> >> I don't understand how a business using OSM data for free and without >> "thinking of the children" (AKA "giving back to the community") is >> bad for the project - every time we get "ripped off" we get a bigger >> audience, the more people that use the data the more more influential >> the map becomes and hence the greater the fun in contributing to it in >> the first place. > > That's how I see it, but there are people whose "fun" seems to be reduced by > the idea that anyone could be making money off their spare time activity. > > Probably the same people who, ten minutes later, diligently update their > Facebook profile so that Facebook gets more advertising revenue ;-) > > Bye > Frederik > > -- Tel: +44(0) 7814 517 807 _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
