I think you're concentrating on tiles, but that's not really the bottleneck I would jump on first.
The conversation goes like this: "steve we have 300 million people a day look at our site and we would like to send their edits and feedback to OSM" Really it's the API we're talking about. Tiles are just a CDN problem. On Jun 17, 2010, at 7:18 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote: > Steve, > >> They would like to link to us directly but don't think a) we can >> handle the load and b) don't think it would be a good user experience >> to dump people on to osm.org, what with the site design. > > To paraphrase (not specifically Wolfram, but the unnamed other megacorps > you're chatting with): > > 1. they'd like to link to us directly but our infrastrucutre is too weak; > > 2. they would not want to give us a shitload of money to improve our > infrastructure, but could imagine hosting something; > > 3. there is fear that the community would view this negatively. > > To which I say, I don't think the community has anything against someone > doing a glorified maps.cloudmade.com; if they have really fast servers and > maybe even a CDN, can do lots of styles and make the tiles and services > available under a free-for-all policy. That would be great, and would - if > given sufficient long-term promise by whoever it is - allow us to reduce our > tile serving to an experimental capacity, freeing up resources for the core > database which obviously we must keep operating ourselves. > > But there is a logical problem here and that has nothing to do with us at > all. You say that many would like to link to OSM directly if only OSM had > sufficient resources. Now assume that some big guy with many enemies, say > Google, or Microsoft, were to offer super-fat tile serving for OSM as I > outlined above. We would then scale back our own tile ops to a minimum, and > their server would be the main OSM tile server, and whenever you go to > www.osm.org your browser says "connecting to osmtile.google.com" or some such. > > I think that the community would be less of a problem - I don't think many > would care if our tiles came from MS or Google or so as long as they were > unrestricted and the data remained free. But all those other big guys, of > whom you say that they would like to link to us - would *they* want to send > their users to get tiles from Google, MS or someone else? Or would the "we'd > like to link to you but your infrastructure cannot take the load and anyway > your front page is ugly" then be replaced with "we'd like to link to you but > you must understand that the 'sponsored by XYZ' on the shiny front page is a > problem"? > > Of course things would be even worse if the big sponsor wanted to put the > tiles or service under a non-open license (e.g. a license with a > "noncommercial" component"). That, I think, would reduce overall usefulness > rather than improving it. Any funded tile serving would have to be more open > than what we can currently offer, not less. > > Bye > Frederik > > -- > Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" > Steve stevecoast.com _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
