SteveC <[email protected]> wrote: >... >They would like to link to us directly but don't think a) we can handle the >load and b) don't think it would be a good user experience to dump people on >to osm.org, what with the site design. Of those that would like to help us >scale the servers, they don't want to be seen to try to 'take over' by hosting >OSM in their data centers ...
Sorry, if I am disturbing, when the "big boys" are talking. ;-) I do not have clue concerning the technical stuff. Could we describe this with those words?: Free Data - proprietary distributed and collected? >... but can't really justify throwing money at us when they have perfectly >good resources we could use. >... >Basically there's a big decision tree that I have half worked out that follows >from 'big company wants to *significantly* help OSM but how?'. I've been >through this decision tree about 6 or 7 times now I think. It would be >interesting to graph it, and each end point node in that tree is 'we can't do >that because of X'. By '*significant*', I mean throwing millions of dollars at >the problem (OSM) because they're already throwing tens to hundreds of >millions at NT/TA and so OSM a viable side bet. Of course you could say 'start >small' but the problem there is that it's usually much easier to release large >resources than small in large organisations. >... But would it not be the way out of the dilemma, if the OSM-Foundation could do something comparable, like the Wikimedia Verein Deutschland (Wikimedia "Foundation" Germany)? They use the sponsors money to pay software engineers. These engeneers do not take part to things, that directly affect the content of Wikipedia or the other projects. For instance these engineers develope the Mediawiki Software and help the voluntaries of the community to improve the data distribution. The last word what is done or not is made by the community, not by the Wikimedia Verein and not by the paid developers. I think, it would be comforting for the community to know, that they do not have only the data but also the own power to distribute and collect them. Further many of them would not like to give their virtual OSM identity to someone else, who possibly is able to join this identity with another ones. Thats one of the reasons, why they support free projects and not proprietary ones. Paid developers could help OSM with all that missions and thus to grow faster. And thus earning money from whoever in order to pay developers would probably be accepted by the community. Possibly Wikimedia/Wikipedia could be a technical partner, that is accepted by the OSM community. They run a worldwide service of their own very well. Probably they are the free project with the most experierce concerning that stuff. Thus: Could someone explain me, how much more traffic OSM has to handle compared to Wikipedia? Would their way work for OSM as well? _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
