Frederik Ramm wrote: > 2. Commercially Valuable Product > > OSM is creating something of considerable commercial value. The > estimated market volume of geodata in Europe is way over one billion > Euros per year (I found varying figures, some even say it's 1.5 billion > for Germany alone, others are more conservative). - I'm sure there was a > market for encyclopedias before Wikipedia arrived but it cannot have > been this big, ever. Or can it? Let me hear figures if you have some.
I suspect that if Wikipedia took Google ads, their revenue would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year. They are the top hit in Google for most factual queries, and people read it looking for facts and info (rather than entertainment) and it's a short step from their to purchasing. So their data also has considerable commercial value, although the value is associated with the eyeballs viewing the most-commonly-used expression of the data (which they control) rather than the data itself. > 3. Not an End Product Not to contradict what you've said, but maybe there is an interesting parallel here between OSM and mozilla.org. Originally, mozilla.org was a "technology provider", the idea being that lots of different companies and organizations would build Foo Browser and Bar Browser and be the distributors. Netscape was the biggest, but they did a fairly poor job of it and still there weren't really many others. After mozilla.org split from AOL/TW/Netscape, we went into the browser business ourselves. The result is Firefox. So it may be that it sounds like a good idea to be a "data provider" and that other people will provide the primary user-facing interface to your data, but that in fact if you want it done well what you have to do is go out there and do it yourself. :-) We're currently caught between the two positions. If we are only a data provider, why is the Cycle Map not hosted elsewhere and linked to from www.openstreetmap.org, along with any other interesting maps and views that people provide? Why doesn't the default map show everything including errors and maplint, so we can more easily see what's there and what's not? But if we are, in fact, the primary front end, then we should decide to go for it, get some super-fast hardware, host as many layers of interest as we can find, and tell everyone to come to www.openstreetmap.org to get their maps rather than maps.google.com. Gerv _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
