Hi, On 12/28/11 14:56, Thomas Davie wrote:
I think this actually may be an opportunity for OSM to make some money. Could we not (given the appropriately motivated person, and I freely admit I'm not he) set up distributing images for servers that are able to run right out the box... Want to run OpenStreetMap? Download this iso, clone it into a VM or onto a real machine, boot, access http://<machines-ip>/ and there's your map, all set up and ready to go.
There's "TileDrawer" already, where you can download ready-made Amazon images for free, and there's a series of Ubuntu packages by Kai Krueger that you just have to install to get a tile server. Or, for smaller-scale operations, you can even use Maperitive for an out-of-the-box solution. And many of us, including myself, spend time answering questions for free on the lists, on help.osm, and elsewhere.
The reason that people pay for this is not that they want a CD-ROM or a download link; these things exist. The reason that people pay for this is that they want customer service. Someone to tell them what hardware to buy; someone to ask them what they want and recommend a good strategy to achieve that with minimal cost; someone to fix a problem when it occurs.
If OSMF wanted to do this then they'd probably have to hire people to provide the service, and that would bring with it a considerable adminsitrative overhead and fixed costs and likely detract them from what they should be doing.
Bye Frederik _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
