A Growing OpenStreetMap Needs Your Support
donate.openstreetmap.org
donate.openstreetmap.org
A frequent question is why the hardware bought and not rented hourly/yearly with a PaaS. First of all the bandwidth requirement are huge and it would put too much pressure on the organization to reach donation goals every year.
Besides the donation runs you can also become a member (https://join.osmfoundation.org/normal-membership/) or you company a corporate member (http://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Corporate_Members).
Unlike wikipedia the donation drive won't need months. If I remember correctly last year two companies gave 20.000 USD each. That said: donate now please.
disclaimer: work at https://geocoder.opencagedata.com/, we're a corporate member
Here's the related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12589447
I've just donated, it's a great project, if you value it too you should give what you are able to.
Kudo to all FOSS GIS developers!
the belief that a non-profit model is the sole method for maintaining ideologically directed development is a fallacy. look to Mozilla, which at times has strayed far from the best interests of its users. look at the wounded soldier project. the belief that making a profit will cause for corruption of the ideological drive of an organization is a fallacy. look at SpaceX which has made more progress in a shorter period of time than just about anyone else to date.
the problem i have with the "please send us money" routine is that it ignores certain basic, fundamental economic and financial realities. if an organization is creating value, then they should be able to exchange value for value. if they are not creating value, then it should be considered R&D or a hobby, and should be funded as such. OpenStreetMap is creating value. there is no reason they shouldn't be able to utilize the freemium model. the freemium model could be coupled with a california style "benefit corporation". by acknowledging that we all must sing for our supper, we are forced to face the realities of the marketplace, of limited resources, of special needs, and so on. by continuing to deny this fact these organizations will constantly be either over or under funded compared to their needs. said more plainly, by staying totally blind to the economic realities of ones marketplace you're gonna make worse business decisions than if you put it all on the table. every time.
bottom line, there is no free lunch, and until the open-source community fully acknowledges and embraces this reality it will be at a disadvantage to other players. and, frankly, it will be lying to itself.
disclaimer: i'm a die-hard open-source software advocate. i just want to see it succeed.
> look at SpaceX which has made more progress in a shorter period of time than just about anyone else to date.
Toward what? Space vacations for rich people? Neat YouTube videos? To some hypothetical advancement which will only affect those with the money to pay for it? Can you give any reasons why I should give a shit that they've progressed toward other people's goals?
> if an organization is creating value, then they should be able to exchange value for value.
Sure, but in the rest of your post you're proposing that they should be obligated to exchange value for value. Ability and obligation are different things.
> by acknowledging that we all must sing for our supper, we are forced to face the realities of the marketplace, of limited resources, of special needs, and so on.
The reason most of us must sing for our supper is that those with the most supper have the ability to withhold supper until we sing. One of the most critical and powerful elements of free and open projects is declining to participate in that system. That is literally the only reason I care at all about free and open projects.
> disclaimer: i'm a die-hard open-source software advocate. i just want to see it succeed.
"Succeed" is undefined if you don't have defined goals. While money is certainly an existential risk to many "open" projects, acquiescing to a for-profit model would in itself be a failure for my goals for these projects (and indeed, my goals are shared by many who contribute to these projects).
Oh wow, I just thought up three possibilities in a minute which still allow it to be kept free for individuals.
Last week I began working on a bicycle routing app for android, and there is no obvious way to have unlimited calls to OSM, even if I paid. So, what I must do is host my own instance of it. That's a lot of overhead for most use cases. This is pretty much the opposite way app development has been going, where I build off an api as a service.
If I'm using OSM wrong in this case, I'd sincerely appreciate being pointed in the right direction.
side note, I'm assuming you down-voted me, but thank you for at least saying why. other down-votes received, because i guess they are right. feels like high-school popularity contests all over again when receiving anonymous down-votes. heck, maybe it's possible to have a dissenting comment without a down-vote. HN obviously believes this mechanism is good enough for letting the best stories rise to the top. not sure why HN feels that people's comments should be down-voted but stories shouldn't...
Further there are multiple on device routing and rendering solutions available so you don't really have to use an online service if your don't want to.
The other aspect is that the OSMF itself doesn't really produce any software at all (you could argue that the website software might be different in this respect). What you think of as OSM the OSS project is really lots of companies and individuals providing SW that works with OSM, not the result of a centralized effort a la WMF, Mozilla, or whatever ...
And I did downvote you, because when I read your comment, it seemed to merely be bashing on OSM, and didn't seem to be adding much value to the conversation. Now that you've clarified, I kind of regret it.
And yes, anonymous downvotes are terrible, which is why if I downvote I usually post a comment explaining why, unless somebody else has already done it better.