Maybe it would be a good idea for everybody to take a deep breath and count to 10?
For those relatively new to the project you should know that Serge has been going on about these "issues" for years, some since I first had the pleasure of meeting him. That doesn't mean that his points are more or less valid, but the general sense of urgency due to a click-bait title stuck above them is rather misplaced. As to the points themselves, they are a mix of things from latent issues that could easily turn serious (lack of man-power in some core areas), over Serges pet peeves (nominatim doesn't do US junctions), to trade-offs that he might disagree with, but are nonetheless not without merit (for example layers, that now and then would be nice to have, but are rather at odds with OSMs more holistic approach to modelling). For now I just want to touch on the money side of things and employing staff. The amounts available for speculative financial investment naturally have nothing to do with operating a self-sustaining (geo-services-) business. And if anybody doubts the difficulties of doing the later, we just had the likely best ever funded geo-startup that was literally able to throw money out of the window, miserably fail when it was supposed to stand on its own feet and actually turn geo-coding, map tiles etc, "over a free tier" in to a sustainable business. Now the OSMF might have a slight advantage due to brand recognition, but that doesn't change the fact that there is not very much money available out there for such services and that such a pivot would come at the cost of ruining the many legit small business that are small but sustainable, and of which many contribute in one way or another to OSM software development and operations. All that said, OSM operations and core software development are dependent on a very very small number of people, some of which have been with us since the project started, we really need more hands full stop. If paying for staff is the solution, difficult to say, what is clear is that we would need a substantially larger continuous stream of donations (think a pineapple fund sized donation every quarter) for any meaningful number of operational staff. In any case I'll be asking for help in a follow up posting on a specific ops issue and expect to see lots of people volunteering :-). Simon PS: The limitation in Nominatims POI search is discussed roughly every half year, well documented and understood, it would undoubtedly be nice if it was fixed and if it is only to avoid the continuous surprise re-discovery of it.
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