Dave, Dave F. wrote:
I fail to see how charging for regurgitated data (as confirmed by Frederik) is positive or productive.
Firstly, lots of people pay money for OSM data (e.g. OSM Garmin maps regularly sell for €20 on eBay). That in itself is positive because it proves that OSM is actually worth something to them. And it isn't that these people pay money for nothing - they pay for someone selecting the right SD card and the right IMG file, copying the file onto the card, making a nice package and a little documentation and shipping it to them, and probably even being available on the phone if there's a problem with the product. In a way, this is the ideal form of commerce - if you have money and don't want to spend the time, buy the ready-made SD card; if you don't have money and can afford to spend the time, here's the document on the Wiki that says how to do it without spending a penny. It's the consumer's choice, and if the producer wants to sell his product he better had to make it worth the money.
It's the same with the book. You can buy it if you like the convenience it brings - the information being neatly and coherently organised, selected, professionally reviewed and proof-read. If you don't want to fork out money for that editorial work, you don't have to; you can do the organising and selecting yourself.
It is even likely that there are people who wouldn't bother using OSM at all if there wasn't a ready-made SD card available for them to buy. In Germany, where the book has been selling for 2.5 years now, many people have definitely taken OSM more seriously when they saw there was a proper book about it - *especially* those outside of the technophile community whom we often have difficulty to reach out to.
(Btw. I think you have slightly misinterpreted me when I said that the book hardly contains anything that hasn't been said here in the last years. You interpreted that as the book regurgitating mailing list posts, when in fact it often was the other way round. The German book, on which this English edition is based, has been around for 2.5 years now, and often I had researched something for the book initially and then "regurgitated" the book content on the lists when the question popped up here.)
Bye Frederik _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
