I have already said it on IRC and we had a nice conversation there, but I will repeat it here for the people who read comments instead of hanging out in #osm:

The complaints you make are not wrong, but they remind me a lot of the complaints of “Linux will never make it on the desktop unless we do X”. And fair enough the year of the Linux desktop never came. But we have Linux 80% or so of all smartphones, a similar fraction of all servers in the Internet and 100% of all supercomputers.

So we should not repeat the kind of mistake that lead to fights if KDE or gnome would be the window manager that brings Linux to all desktops. But we should try and create the Android of open maps and databases of geo information. There is nothing to be gained by fighting a war in the community in the attempt to unify people behind a single window manager or new area data type.

What we need to do is to figure out “where would OSM be really usefull and what can we gain from the people with that use case?” And that question will not be answered in diary posts or by blindly doing what Google does.

And to be honest I do not have the answer to that either. But maybe somebody of you has found it. If that is the case, don’t bother arguing about what OSM should do. Just make it happen.

Regarding freedom of speech:

Just like any other idiot on the internet who faces backlash for being stupid you fail to understand what freedom of speech is about. It protects you from the government deciding “this opinion is too dangerous to be allowed to be uttered in public”.

Two points are important there: It protects you from the government and in public space. It does not guarantee in any way what you can do in somebody else private space. If you are a guest at somebodies home and start talking shit about his mother you get punched in the face and get kicked out and that is perfectly fine with freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.

So OSM is in not way obliged to store and disseminate your rambling on server that they pay for. Be glad that you just get banned when ever you go completely of the rocker and don’t get punched in the face for it.

Invoking freedom of speech and human rights just shows your general lack of clue and usual disillusion of grandeur.

And who should provide all those tools? Magical unicorns? Remember: talk is cheap but developers are rare and overworked.

The streetname “Via Konrad Adenauer” in Openstreetmap is totally correct. The search function just is too stupid to search by partial matches. The underlying problem is that the Garmin map format is not documented and had to be reverse engineered. The fact that address search works at all is the result of weeks of hard work of unpaid volunteers. Yes a more comfortable address search would be nice. But that is very unlikely to happen without some help from Garmin.

I have seen that with GPS units that were moving while getting the initial fix. After stopping and moving around slowly the track was shifted a couple of meters for the next 20 minutes or so.

Kleiner Tipp: die Perl-Version von osmarender ist locker einen Faktor 10 schneller als die XSLT-Version.

You do know that the fact that there are NO free geodata available in the UK is the reason why Openstreetmap was started, right?

Es gibt viele Methoden das hinzubekommen:

* Auf www.openstreetmap.org die gewünschte Stelle mit einem Doppelklick zentrieren und sich dann den Permalink anschauen, entweder in dem man mit dem Mauszeiger über dem Link bleibt und die Statusleiste anschaut, oder indem man auf den Permalink klickt und dann die Adresszeile anschaut.

* Andere Möglichkeit wäre www.informationfreeway.org zu verwenden, da hat man in der rechten unteren Ecke eine Anzeige über welchen Koordinaten der Mauszeiger gerade ist.

* gll.petschge.de nehmen. Da hat man in der Mitte der Webseite ein Fadenkreuz was man wie gewünscht positionieren kann, die Koordinaten stehen dann oben unter dem Suchfeld für Ortsnamen.

Saying "I don't have programming experience" is like saying "I don't know how to cook" and buying junk food. We all started out without programming experience and had to learn. Ok those bugs are a lot more complicated to fix then they look like and are probably not a good thing to learn programming with, but there are qutie a few "easy" bugs a beginner could tackle. And if some beginners did that the experienced people would have more time to work on the nasty bugs.

The planet dump from November 3rd has 2527419825 lines.