> On Oct 12, 2015, at 1:32 PM, Alex Barth <a...@mapbox.com> wrote: > "our problems" would of course need more definition and I'm running the risk > here of misinterpreting what you said. I'm thinking about all the cases where > OSM isn't used yet, all the mapping that isn't happing in OSM yet. OSM has > the potential to fundamentally change how we capture and share knowledge > about the world but we aren't anywhere near the full impact we should be > having. 300,000 active mappers is impressive but the world is much bigger. At > a time where the internet that was supposed to be Open is turning more and > more into a closed game of big players and growth for OSM is linear - what's > our plan?
Yes - we discovered that OSM is linear at CloudMade and our VCs were worried too, but that’s not quite the same thing as it being a problem for OSM. > Fixing the license surely can't be the extent of our plan, but we need to be > able to have a frank conversation about how licensing is hurting use cases > and engagement on OSM, without second guessing people's intentions and > without just showing them the door to TomTom and HERE. In that context I find > comparing ODbL to Public Domain absolutely useful. This isn’t the way the world is going. It used to be a decade ago there were two globalish maps, NavTeq and TeleAtlas. Now there are five - Nokia, TomTom, Google, Waze and OSM. My bet is we’ll have 10 or 20 maps in a while, of which OSM is only one. The cost to produce them is dropping dramatically and the incentive to do so is growing dramatically. Think cell phones we didn’t have 10 years ago and the number of companies that want to control a map. Note that with each additional map created, the value per map drops too. Thus OSMs dollar value is actually declining over time. One can argue whether it’s price or value or both. Thus - Stace or anyone else now have 5 options for maps today and some of them even have the geocoding he wants (which the whole bogus argument is predicated upon, since we don’t have any geocoding data in the first place). This is much better than only having 2 options a few years ago. If we want a PD OSM, someone should go build it. It wouldn’t be hard or take long. One would probably be done in less than 3 years... maybe only 2 - it wouldn’t take the 11 years OSM did to get to the same place since one don’t have to learn or prove anything. And one wouldn’t have to sit here arguing about anything, one could use that time building things. Even more importantly, one could use learnings outside of OSM like the things that Waze did extremely well - far better than OSM or anyone else - and one can do all this almost for free. Best Steve _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
