On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 5:05 PM, SteveC <st...@asklater.com> wrote: > Once you have the criteria of what goes in to the measuring pot of the "OSM > economy" you further have large error bars on the data for each thing. For > example, are those freelancers going to tell you what kind of money they're > making?
It's almost pointless to count actual revenue. The reason why no one started a new competitor to NA / TA in the mid-noughties, was that the intense competition would reduce revenue making it unprofitable. (Ok Google started to compete with NA / TA, but they cleverly combined it with other things like streetview). Most open source / open content projects are a bit like a security guard or an external auditor. If all goes well, it will appear to casual observers that their only function is to consume oxygen. But take them away and you get chaos. A better exercise would be to take the page rank of osm.org and compare it with the market cap of a website with the same page rank. Or compare the number of tags in our database with the number of tags in the NA / TA databases and their values on the balance sheets of their parents. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
