{"id":681,"date":"2012-01-12T15:15:15","date_gmt":"2012-01-12T15:15:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/?p=681"},"modified":"2013-06-30T16:04:21","modified_gmt":"2013-06-30T16:04:21","slug":"open-street-map-beats-google-maps-for-business-use","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/2012\/01\/12\/open-street-map-beats-google-maps-for-business-use\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Street Map beats Google Maps for business use."},"content":{"rendered":"

Google have started gouging<\/a> for Google Maps. It turns out that when you price like Oracle, people do the numbers and say fuck it<\/a>:<\/p>\n

$200,000 to $300,000 a year is, at the very least, the same as hiring a very good engineer for a year (and paying all the taxes and benefits and costs and still having a lot of money left). It was enough money to finally push us into doing our own maps.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(More detail<\/a>. They didn’t actually spend less money — generating and serving all the map tiles is the expensive bit — but they got much more control and a much better result for the same money.)<\/p>\n

I’ve long thought OpenStreetMap<\/a> would have fit Wikimedia’s portfolio wonderfully — it’s a marvellous example of a project doing really well with the Wikipedia model, without being a linked entity. (And thus helping our mission without us doing the work<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

I remember a London Dorkbot presentation in 2004 on OSM — a friend who was working for Multimap pooh-poohed the idea that OSM could ever achieve a usable-quality map. I had been involved in Wikipedia for a few months at that time and considered this immediately obviously wrong, having seen what a few people just chucking in what they knew could achieve even at that stage.<\/p>\n

OSM now has a foundation<\/a>. Seeing as their server appears to be melting, they could probably do with a quid or two<\/a>. They’re not yet officially a UK charity, but WMUK achieving charitable status<\/a> does makes this more feasible.<\/p>\n

There should be no chance to gouge for this sort of content. What other rent-seeking business models can the Wikipedia model destroy? Update:<\/b> List of things that need to be free<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google have started gouging for Google Maps. It turns out that when you price like Oracle, people do the numbers and say fuck it: $200,000 to $300,000 a year is, at the very least, the same as hiring a very good engineer for a year (and paying all the taxes and benefits and costs and … Continue reading “Open Street Map beats Google Maps for business use.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wiki"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4FmVR-aZ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=681"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1107,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681\/revisions\/1107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}