[Geodata] Geodata Mission

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2007 at 11:01:14AM -0600, David William Bitner wrote:
> What are the hurdles to this?  Why is there an (perceived or real)
> anti-OSGeo streak?  Get this stuff in the lists.

I think the primary reason that some of the main movers behind OSM are
against using donated resources is:

08:54:52 <TomH> and I'm not interested in constructing (and then having
to manage!) vast global inrastructures cobbled together from donated
bits and bobs

Certainly, there was significant push-back from TomH (the main server
admin for OSM) against moving OSM's distributed tile management service
(http://tah.openstreetmap.org/) to TelaScience hosted resources. In the
end, it didn't matter: the OSM servers couldn't cope with the load, so
it moved, end of story. But any situations which doesn't involve
shipping hardware to UCL is typically seen as a 'rogue' action.  

There is also, in my experience, an irrational anti-OSGeo movement
within the OSM community, centered around the view of OSGeo as a "GIS
community", and "OSM is not GIS". http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=198 is
representative of that feeling, I believe.         

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer