@mboeringa: true, that’s developers. But it’s them who decide what others see on their websites. OSM offers them less features:

• no good address base
• no out-of-the-box geocoding

OSM was better in terms of level-of-detail, but at least in Russia, by 2015 this gap was mostly covered by Google and Yandex maps.

I second the last thought: the debate in the comments here turned into (a) contradiction, “no, everything is fine” (b) debate of the debate itself. I’ve not seen a simple invitation to suggest a better solution.

@mboeringa: I drew entire towns around, filled them with names of landmarks and important places, and still people there put OSM on their websites for a few months, and then switched to Google or Yandex maps. Yes, people prefer other things, like easy JS API, for example, address search and geocoder.

Agree. You’ve just came to my conclusion from 2016.

It’s increasingly impossible to do anything in OSM besides drawing base map and downloading it.

As a programmer in a company that uses OSM I’m already using Google Directions for public transit, because it’s easier to raise a dead than an OSM-based PT router. And I don’t want to haul the stack (Valhalla needs 2 auxiliary servers to get PT working).

“Zveriks’ bandwagon” - Бушман, похоже, мы тебя лишили единственного удовольствия - обсирать вновь пришедших на форум ОСМ. И Шурика тоже. Найдите себе уже получше занятие в жизни.

To anyone reading this from abroad. Dzertanoj seems to write in the style of BushmanK, has equal attitude towards Zverik and writes in details that such a newcomer would not be able to know.

He and LLIypuk82 were the two most prominent trolls before we got elected as moderators. They both eventually got 1-2 weeks of blocking, LLIypuk got blocked twice. Looks like it’s now a matter of personal vengeance.

The arguments against Zverik, as you see, are entirely theoretical: “he can”, “he may”, “he has a conflict of interest”, “bandwagon”.

Aggressive comments by Dzertanoj only show me that they fight for the right to criticise Maps.me and Ilya Zverev personally. I think there are plenty of channels to write complaints of MM functions, like MM support, feedback page, etc. If someone insists that MM is a bad editor in general, write to the OSM directors board, DWG or other places. Writing that on Russian forum is just an excercise in expressing your anger. Russian section is not for that. I think MM gets so much attention specifically because one of it’s team is on the forum. I can’t remember Russian users complaining of the evil iD developers or Potlatch, even though newbies do commit errors in them just as frequently.

So, the OP shows one example of a talk and extrapolates this to the entire state of the forum? I call this a false accusation.

0) Zverik has a conflict of interests, but maps.me is also more discussed than other editors, because there’s him to blame. If you insist it damages the forum, please show more examples of moderatorship abuse.

The case you show:

1) freeExec wrote “developers didnt’ read”, but he lives in another city, and could not see them work, nor read their mind. This form of criticism was incorrect.

2) discussing moderatorship as you propose is a bad idea: the people who tend to have conflicts will come and accuse moderators upon any warning, and will come up with earlier discussions, and so on. There will be no end to this. Moderator in this situation has to both maintain work, respond to whatever claims, and try not to abuse their position. etc.

If moderators work poorly, then enough people should be displeased with the situation, so there would be no problem to initiate elections.

This was actually the case when we got elected. We all got tired of the forum full of trolling. And people did come and vote for us.

И вопрос, как рисовали картинки синие для поста?

Офигеть. А есть скрипты для обработки этого на Grass GIS?

You’re the Trump of OSM.

@Zkir: makes sense.

Well, tiles are not my business, it’s up to you.

But they are a gateway for newcomers to OSM. Do you agree on this or not?

But you do compete with commercial providers. To have money in the foundation, and contributors, it has to show value. The existing value of the data, as I pointed, is not forever.

@Zverik: it was non-commercial consumer partnership. It can’t make profit by our civil code.

@Hjart: I personally have no business that will benefit on free tile servers, so I won’t do it. Never the less other companies offer a lot for free. Free OSM tiles are one of the reasons people install it in their websites and others learn about OSM. Of course, I have no data to draw conclusions and give advices.

Probably, you both are 100% right, tiles for big websites is too much of a free service.

My problem is with the reasoning behind this: “we don’t owe you” in 5 years made a project that nobody needed.

It’s pretty easy to make this with OSM. You may tell others to render tiles themselves, but this will work only until a commercial provider offers vector maps at reasonable rate and quality. For big websites this makes sense. Small websites always choose Google and other providers over OSM.

Data researchers (I’m one of them) use OSM for data. But the data is not free. Neither as in freedom (ODBL), nor as in beer: assembling and cleaning the data is really labour intensive. Community maintenance – commercial companes do this too, better and better. Nothing keeps users attached to OSM.

@Zverik: You’re wrong on figures. In 2001 this was 120 rubles, which for a fast connection was almost free. No way you could find even dial-up cheaper than 500..1000 per month.