On Sun, Oct 9, 2011 at 10:39 AM, Richard Weait <rich...@weait.com> wrote: > On Sun, Oct 9, 2011 at 9:51 AM, Nick Whitelegg > <nick.whitel...@solent.ac.uk> wrote: >> On Sat, Oct 8, 2011 at 10:36 AM, Richard Fairhurst <rich...@systemed.net> >> wrote: >>>Please bear in mind that, even if we wanted to offer free tiles to every >>>commercial app in the world, our hosts would not permit us to do so. > [ ... ] >> Absolutely. This may be a rather controversial opinion, but would it maybe >> be a good idea to offer "Qt like licencing" for use of the OSM tile server? > > Having the OSMF provide commercial tiles is a bad idea. It would: > - reduce services available to the community > - expose the project to additional risk > - hurt the community by competing against it
People want to use OSM, and OSM needs resources. These are facts. It's also a fact that a lot of people/organizations, when we tell them "Run your own tileserver", don't want to. And they also don't want to use a third party tile service. They don't want to because they aren't interested in a "Mapworld Map" or a "Sunmap Map"- they want an OpenStreetMap map. And they're willing to pay for it. They're willing to give us resources in exchange for using our resources. Having people pay for their use of resources in one form and pay for them in another form is a basic part of economics. We can take the tile server and move it outside of our donated service, allowing users to contribute directly to it, either in direct sale, or "suggested donations", which would give us money to both offset the cost of the service, and for other things we want to. Commercial map providers are great, but people want to be associated directly with, That association has value to them, and if it has value to them, instead of constantly waging a war against them via blocking tiles and checking logs and blocking apps, we could instead have a way to work with these folks. I also suggested an "Endorsed vendor" program, but I guess that was dismissed by the Powers That Be? My central argument is this: We spend a lot of resources blocking bad actors. We then spend a lot of time/energy/effort trying to get them to use commercial vendors (who we have no association with) or to run their own. A lot of these guys don't want to run their own; it's not their interest and not their domain, and they want to be associated with us. I see that as an opportunity to work with them. Instead of pushing them away, we can work with them. That's good for them, and it would give us a additional resources to carry on our mission. - Serge _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
