One could set up an entirely separate not-for-profit organisation e.g. "Openstreetmap-Applications" that is geared towards providing OSM based user oriented services, such as tileservers, user friendly map interfaces,... It could charge commercial customers a fee proportionally to operating costs and potentially offer services for free to non commercial users and organisations.
This would help a) OpenStreetMap, as more people would potentially use OSM data, making it more popular than thus resulting in more mappers b) Users and mappers, as they can get the services they want (and need to keep up motivation to contribute to OSM) and OSM(F) currently don't offer. c) Commercial app developers, as they can pool tileserver resources making it more efficient and get access to them for the cost of opperations. As it would be an entirely different entity, it wouldn't effect current OSMF negatively. The main people it would harm would be those who are trying to make money off of OSM. Although some of them do currently offer a very valuable service, the main objective of OSMF should not be to protect commercial interests of OSM, so competing with other commercial OSM entities should not be an exclusion reason. Kai -- View this message in context: http://gis.638310.n2.nabble.com/OSMF-to-provide-commercial-tile-service-WAS-something-else-tp6874406p6875093.html Sent from the General Discussion mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
