wAllDueRespect

all good, that's why i appreciated your comment :) fostered conversation, and we met in the middle! take it easy!

my guess is that UPS will eat their lunch. this is UPS's core business. they prob weren't doing what Amazon needed them to do partially because they have other customers and partially because Amazon likely wanted too much from them based on what Amazon was willing to pay. Amazon will likely place onerous requirements on sellers to squeeze pennies out of the shipping process. and then, eventually, when more of commerce has converted to the mail-delivered model, and UPS is making a profit, and Amazon realizes that they're throwing good resources after bad in an experiment gone wrong, they'll get back to focusing on selling stuff and out of the business of delivering stuff.

How so..? Open-source is twice free. Free as in beer. Free as in speech. So, OSM could give away the map, but provide value added services to city planners, sell api tokens to advertisers, sell services to private developers.

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...

and here is where i have a problem with "Open..."anything.

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.