On Sep 23, 2010, at 9:43 AM, Nic Roets wrote: > On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 5:05 PM, SteveC <[email protected]> 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).
I disagree. The lack of competition is the sunk capital in creating the map. There's lots of room for a third player, and some people tried. But the cost of mapping the whole US or Europe is large, and the risks high. > > 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. Now that's a neat idea. Steve stevecoast.com _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
