While just as Mikel and Richard noted moving to a paid model for the tiles is unlikely to make any financial sense (and I’ve run the numbers). It’s a cut throat business, and there isn’t very much room between commercial provider free tiers and their service offerings with substantially more features than what we could offer.
But I do think there is at least some value in contacting the likely candidates in those top 400 users for corporate membership, not a new idea in any form btw. More so as I suspect, as mentioned above, we will be restarting this drama with the vector tile service.
Courtney, there are 14 users in this thread. Opposed to about 100 people actively involved in the OSM Foundation and hundreds of thousands people mapping.
You are absolutely invited to help with another round of a fundraising drive, the last one being a large success. A lot of things (different from the relatively well funded tile servers) will run more smoothly if we can afford a second sysadmin, a couple of software development projects, community support in various ways, and a management support unit for that, see the Strategic Plan.
As much as I turn it in my head, I simply don’t think the initial question makes sense.
Asking an OSMer if the project needs to produce a map is like asking a human if they really need to do eating. Of course we need to produce our own map for osm.org. The map is an absolutely vital part of the feedback mechanism for our mapping. Releasing control over the map to some external entity would give such an entity very tight control over the project. That’s out of the question. That means the utility of our own servers for the OSM community is infinite and thus always lower than the cost.
I presume what the question rather meant is what are cost vs. utility for the OSM community that the tile servers are used by people outside the project. That makes slightly more sense but there is a catch. Once you take into account how tile serving works technically, you know that the servers are in fact accessible by everybody by default and shutting people out takes work, the actual question to ask becomes:
What is the cost vs. utility for the OSM community for restricting outside access to our tile servers?
Once you start looking at the problem from that side, many of the answers above might make much more sense. The utility is mainly that the OSM community needs to finance less resources or even might make money out of the tile servers. The cost is that we have to maintain much more complex software, possibly go commercial with all the strings attached (customer services, SLAs API keys, etc), possibly contentions discussions what counts as outsiders and what counts as insiders, etc.
From a sysadmin perspective, I would like to point out that tweaking the hardware and software to get that additional bit of throughput is fun and something I’m happy to do as a volunteer. Putting restriction systems in place is so boring that you probably need to pay people for doing so.
@courtiney, I believe fundraising is your wheelhouse, and you are welcome to criticize ideas and statements you view as wrong-headed, but please do it with a finer brush.You are only succeeding at squandering goodwill by using encompassing phrases such as ‘you all’ instead of offering pointed specific criticisms.
If you have written (here or elsewhere) more about using the emails of tile users to raise revenue, I at least, would be interested to read it. No pressure, though – I can certainly understand your frustration!
(edit: I see above you mentioning sending occasional appeals for donations to tile users – which makes a lot of sense to me! As I understand from the Tile Usage Policy, we currently require users to identify themselves (via HTTP User-Agent), and recommend an email contact, but don’t explicitly require an email, or make an explicit statement that we will collect the emails and send out occasional donation appeals. Doing those things seem good to me, and likely feasible (probably grandfathering in existing users). )
This reminds me of an episode a few years back. After the OWG started blocking some particularly rabid Pokémon Go fan sites from hotlinking osm.org tiles, these sites eventually fell back to the same Wikimedia Maps tiles that appear in Wikipedia articles. Although the Wikimedia Foundation’s in-house Wikimedia Cloud Services are a force to be reckoned with, the periodic surges in demand, coupled with a poorly maintained raster tile pipeline, caused outages that impacted Wikipedia’s readership.
The WMF determined that it didn’t make any strategic sense to spend donor resources serving maps to a subculture that Wikipedia had already once sent into exile. So in 2020, they shut off all external access to Wikimedia Maps. The collateral impact ranged from the OSM Wiki and Wikimedia Italia (an OSM local chapter) to the Ukrainian Government Contact Centre. Some of it eventually got sorted out, but the main benefit to Wikimedia has been technical stability, not fiscal stability.
Why did our wiki rely on Wikimedia Maps instead of our own tile server? Because we used one of several map extensions for MediaWiki that defaulted to Wikimedia Maps. Likewise, a lot of the sites that use osm.org tiles don’t do so very consciously; they just use the default provided by a client-side map library such as Leaflet, OpenLayers, or Folium. If these libraries were unable to offer osm.org tiles as a default, they would be more difficult to use out of the box. Casual developers would be more inclined to give up and integrate a library like the Google Maps SDK, Apple MapKit JS, or Esri ArcGIS JavaScript, enduring other restrictions and falling farther beyond OSM’s reach.
These casual developers – are they a prime fundraising opportunity for the OSMF? I don’t know. Anecdotally, from looking at my bookmarks of local sites that embed osm.org tiles, maybe the county park district might be interested in chipping in a bit, but not the charitable thrift store or the mom-and-pop restaurant. If you give them the impression that the locator map on their homepage comes with any strings attached, they’ll remove it from the page. Poof goes the attribution. Surely we can find more generous classes of donors than this.
It’s great that OpenFreeMap exists. Are they willing to take on all our tile server’s external traffic, without receiving a commensurate increase in donations? Are we willing to cede a mostly passive outreach program to a third party?
In my own understanding, that of a contributor who still considers himself as an outsider, your (excellent) way of putting things and the initial question are two sides of the same coin.
But I can’t be certain because in all these debates the underlying vision and endgame are not visible at all to me. They are obviously evident to all the debaters, just not to me.
Starting from there, I’d like to probe the question you raise (openstreetmap.org for insiders or for outsiders) with an example: https://openstreetmap.fr. Through this site I know what their goals are; it then makes sense to me that they use part of their money to e.g. buy and lend 360º, or to launch projects like Panoramax.
I know that local chapters and OSMF are not the same thing. I know that there is another website named switch2osm. I’m just stressing that openstreetmap.org as a website is like a private joke to me, just as well as this thread: the endgame (of the OSMF, of the website, of the debaters) are not clear to me.
I think the confusion arises because you are mixing up OSM, the project, and OSMF, the institution, here.
openstreetmap.org is the website of OSM, the project. The goal of the project is essentially to be a place to commonly collect geodata that’s open for everyone to use. Hence the huge map on the site.
OSMF a official legal entity that is there to supports the project by running the servers, defending legal interests like license and trademark and in general supporting the community. Its website is at osmfoundation.org and, while not exactly pretty, it does state the goals.
While OSM (the project) essentially runs on love and dedication, OSMF (the non-profit company) needs some funding in order to fulfill its functions (paying for servers, for running and maintaining them and the software, legal fees, etc.). The underlying question in this discussion is, where does the OSMF get its money from and is it fair that there are entities that use our services (map, search, etc.) for free without giving anything back to OSM (in form of data) or OSMF (in form of money).
This all ties in turn into a larger debate of who is part of the OSM community, who controls where the project is going and (probably most contentious of all) how much needs the OSMF to become like a company in order to remain able to fulfill its functions to support the project.
Yes. More or less deliberately (I had honestly forgotten about the web site of the OSMF).
But even your reply underlines the (involuntary, I’m sure) opacity of the “political” links between OSM and the OSMF, and opacity of the “political tensions” that underline the debates in this thread.
When I vote in my country and my city, I know that the end goal of the government is to make citizens happy and I am asked to choose between several competing approaches to that goal. Here, I am told that OSM and OSMF are two different things. Does it mean that when I vote for the OSMF board it has no impact at all on OSM? Obviously not, if only because OSMF owns the brand. And obviously there are implicit tensions between approaches to reaching the goals of OSM. Serving tiles or not seems to be part of those tensions, and the underlying debates are probably related to the vision that is proposed to the OSM community. But this is all implicit to me.
In the opinion of the donors around me, they are all very well informed that the tiles are freely available to everyone via the Internet, which is part of their motivation.
Thanks to all who provided detailed explanations on the differences between the OSM community and the OSMF. Focusing more on the topic of this thread (“costs vs utility of the tile servers to the OSM community”), what is not clear to me by reading the original question and the various replies is:
whether this is a topic for the OSMF or for the OSM community
as said before, what is the actual reach of this debate? how does it impact the goals that are shared by the OSM community?
From your reply, Simon, I am tempted to understand that the topic is primarily considered a “technical issue” internal to the OSMF. But the heat of the debate and, as you mention, its persistence over a decade, hint at more than that. What else hides behind it? What “political” divergences about the future of OSM does it reveal, that might help us new OSMF members form an opinion?
Reading some of the replies, I am starting to wonder whether there is a discrepancy between the (limited) roles assigned to the OSMF and the (powerful) assets that it manages. As hinted in some replies, the OSM brand and the licensing rights that the OSMF controls are powerful tools that can be used for other shared goals of the OSM community than running tile servers. Is it this kind of debate that is implicit in this thread?
One possible solution would be to restrict access to free tiles, develop an SDK, and offer a paid service that includes not only vector tiles but also a validated map, similar to what Wikimedia is doing with Enterprise Wikimedia. This way, the OSMF could generate revenue while also improving map quality. I’m certain that many companies currently hiring paid mappers would support this idea. However, the central question remains: who will take on this responsibility? The OSMF has never had very strong or active leadership, and increasingly it seems that this may be intentional.