On 28 Dec 2011, at 10:21, Frederik Ramm wrote: > > I think that this person is also caught between the "I'm in the USA" / "I'm > not in the USA" divide. It seems to me that while 90% of OSM activity happens > outside the US, 90% of activity in that thread comes from inside the US, so I > am not surprised at seeing a distorted image. Nowhere in the world would > someone claim that OSM was using the "exact same data as Google", except > maybe in the US. And in many European countries a statement like "80% of my > town is unmapped" would simply be impossible.
You are over-exagerating. Within the last 12 months my town (in scotland) was 100% unmapped. The most that was there was the major road that travels through it's centre and a label saying "Elgin is here". I would be *very* surprised if there weren't significant towns in europe that are still totally unmapped. >> Setting up your own tile >> infrastructure is something that's easier now thanks to all the work >> that's gone into Mapnik, Planet replication and other tools. Can we >> make it easier in the eyes of a business, by showing how the costs >> too are predictable and doable? > > I think we could, but then I don't think that we need to worry. I do this as > a business, and I am by far not the only person to do it. At the moment the > market is still small but it is only a question of time until many other > players big and small will start offering ready-made OSM tile servers, and > they will become a commodity with lots of competition. Companies selling them > will make sure that their advantages vis-a-vis a GMaps service are well known > and advertised - better, I like to think, that we could do it ourselves. I > don't think that we need to spend valuable volunteer resources on making OSM > fly commercially; we can count on capitalism to do that for us. I think this actually may be an opportunity for OSM to make some money. Could we not (given the appropriately motivated person, and I freely admit I'm not he) set up distributing images for servers that are able to run right out the box... Want to run OpenStreetMap? Download this iso, clone it into a VM or onto a real machine, boot, access http://<machines-ip>/ and there's your map, all set up and ready to go. Want to tweak the rendering? Choose from a number of pre-defined stylesheets. Worried about data replication? Don't worry, it's already set up in cron to update its data from planet files reasonably regularly. Worried about the hardware you need? Here's the specs necessary to get this to work at various loads... Bob _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
