Hi, On 07/09/2013 09:36 AM, Maarten Deen wrote:
The problem with OSM is that with Google, Google maps is the go-to site to get everything:
[...]
It just is less userfriendly than having it all on one site.
Then again, having all this offered by different people and not by one big corporate behemoth might also have advantages. If one day the people at fietsrouteplanner-zuid.nl make a business decision you don't like - say, they tune their parameters in a way you don't agree with, or display advertising, or require registration or whatnot - then you can use someone else's site (or, if one doesn't exist, someone else can with relative ease set up a site).
Let's not kid ourselves - even if we *were* to offer everything as a one-stop shop, we'd still have people with special interests whom we couldn't serve from the main site and for whom special third-party sites would be created, and it is in *those* where the value of OSM really becomes apparent.
The great thing about OSM is not that we might one day have a site where you can do everything that you can do on Google too; the great thing is that everyone can set up their *own* site where you can do something. And shouldn't we actively encourage that (by, perhaps, better integrating osm.org with third party sites) rather than building our very own corporate behemoth?
Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
