On 12 August 2016 at 19:11, Andy Allan <[email protected]> wrote: > We've always allowed other people to use our spare capacity on the > tileservers, but recently it's got completely out of hand. Most of the > use of our tileservers has become developers looking for free maps, > nothing to do with the rest of the project. Often these are commercial > companies who are using our tileservers and selling their apps. > Subsidising commercial companies isn't the best use of community > donations and volunteer sysadmin time, when there are many alternative > services (such as those run by CartoDB, Stamen, etc) that provide > zero-cost map layers based on OSM data anyway.
I would tend to disagree. Our Articles of Association state: | 3. The Foundation is established for the purposes listed below: | | (1) encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial | data; and | (2) providing geospatial data for anybody to use and share. To me this would include the distribution of geospational data in compiled form, i.e. as a map. I think it would be great if we had the resources to provide free maps to anybody, including commercial companies. I realize there are practical considerations that make this infeasible at the moment, but I think it would be a nice target to aim for. The easier and cheaper to use Openstreetmap-data, the more people will use it, which will hopefully in turn lead to more contributors and better data. I would also like to point out that there might be a conflict of interest here between commercial operators of OpenStreetMap services, and the rest of the community. -- Matthijs _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
