>Please bear in mind that, even if we wanted to offer free tiles to every >commercial app in the world, our hosts would not permit us to do so. Nor is >it OSM's role to give OpenMaps a competitive advantage by providing it with >a free server when (for example) the OffMaps developers offer similar apps >but pay for their own servers. (Of course, if any individuals wanted to >start a project to provide such a free tile server, I'm sure it would be >very popular.)
Absolutely. This may be a rather controversial opinion, but would it maybe be a good idea to offer "Qt like licencing" for use of the OSM tile server? Rather than paying say GBP100 a month for their hosting (I'm guessing it would be that much for a serious tile provider , as I pay around GBP25 for mine and still encounter osm2pgsql import issues) could closed-source/commercial apps maybe pay a similar amount to OSM instead to pay for increased server power? If you're making a profit on your app, it kind-of seems fair to pay for use of tiles, while app or library developers using an open-source licence would still be able to use the tiles for free, with a perhaps more generous usage allowance than presently. The original suggestion of vector rendering seems a good one though, perhaps better, in certain cases than setting up your own tile server. Given that planet extracts are readily downloadable, and as server resources are the thing that need to be minimised if at all possible, offloading rendering to the client can only be a good thing. Nick
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