we consider all your disagreements are all invalid

If you haven't seen this wiki page I really really encourage you to do so. Voting is currently 0 for, 11 against and yet he ploughs on undaunted, like a Ukrainian tractor. This guy is just awsome, we're trying to get him to keynote State of the Map.

In Soviet Russia, features request you

Hey.

Good to be back with my adoring public, I've been racking up the DOPPLR! miles and haven't had much time to post.

So you might not realise this but we've set up a Cloud Made office in Kiev, and over the last few weeks we've been shuttling back and forth on Crazhalot - what used to be the Ukrainian arm of Aeroflot but they rebranded.

We've hired the finest programmers in the Ukraine, and these guys are HOT. I mean, as hot as a stolen collective tractor. They all learned on samizdat ZX Spectrums made in Ust-Kamenogorsk back in the 1980s. So when we said "mapping party" - and they counted there weren't enough Navis to go round - within two hours they'd cloned a whole Garmin etrex and put JOSM in the firmware and a little Rails server. I'm telling you, they're good.

Actually the mapping party went pretty well, have a look. Nick's the polymath so he's been doing the rounds with the Cyrillic street signs, as far as I know they're probably directing me to South Bumfuck, Lithuania but he seems to have it under control. I've been doing the whole Great Leader shtick and the Ukrainian guys seem to find it comforting. In fact I swear I heard one of them call me Stalin which is a compliment, I think.

And did I mention Andy 'cyclemap' Allan's our tech lead now? He seemed to find it all a bit disconcerting at first, but we brought along a load of little blue cycle route arrows and stuck them on signs in utterly random directions, and he feels much more at home now.

So I've been talking to some of the OSM community about this and they all say, hey, El Coasto, why Kiev?

Well there's the cheap booze and the hot coders and it's not on Google, that's three good reasons. And let's face it it's more exotic than Reigate, and it's closer to London than Oxfordshire is.

But basically it's because there's no word for "should" in Ukrainian.

I shit you not. You try and say "We should have a testbed dev server" and it comes out as "на хуй срака dev server", which Nick tells me translates as "I kindly volunteer to set up dev server, it will be done in 15 minutes". You say "We should have nested relations and a fixed ontology to give our data hierarchical structure, without which it is useless", and it translates as "холера! узни мене шлюха, PostGIS шлях трафуть", i.e. "but of course! I realise how these assertions are meaningless without proof and rather irritating. So I will have comprehensive set of benchmarks for you in five minutes".

It means OSM development gets done so much quicker. You might wonder why there aren't many messages on talk-ua. In fact there isn't a talk-ua. They just get on and do it.

We have one guy called Arjam Munroski who can't open his mouth without promising some new features. You should see his working copy of the rails port. It does actually have a spaceship.

¿Qué diablos? aka What. The. Fuck.

http://geo.topf.org/comparison/index.html?mt0=googlemap&mt1=mapnik&lon=-0.343705&lat=39.48158&z=17

Update: this is even better

New Professional SteveC

All this VC funding means I've got to get serious. No more 'have fun', from now on it's a strictly professional sign-off.

Also I've been advised it's no longer appropriate to call people fuckwits. Apparently 'tards' is ok though. So I reckon that gives me the right to call people fucktards.

Best

Get with the programme

So Ed is half right and half wrong.

Half wrong (and not just for the awsome misspelling): "your only open when you're losing". What this actually means is that when you're open you can't lose. By definition. But Ed knows that.

Half right: Ed goes to the freetard gathering (that's us) to get ideas. Smart move. This is why Google and Ed are dominating the geosphere and no-one else is anywhere to be seen, apart from us and maybe Apple have some secret stuff in a lab somewhere.

Yes, the smart guys have figured how crowdsourcing their R&D gets better results and you don't even have to pay for it. So in the spirit of being open here's some hints for other geospatial d00ds on how to monetise the freetard community, from someone who knows. No charge.

Vanessa Lawrence: Ed knew you're going to have to open up, and admit it, you know it too. So give away the cheap stuff and keep Mastermap to yourself. Announce some sort of partnership with us, it'll win over the /. crowd and give you kudos in Government - so DCLG is more likely to pony up for you to map Monmouthshire - while essentially meaning fuck all. Drop the NC clause on Openspace, it makes you look stupid (everyone uses GMaps anyway) and gives the typotards at the Grauniad even more reason to grumble. Speaking of who:

Charles Arthur : Read some economics books, hippy.

Oh, and you might want to bid for serialisation rights on Sean's autobiog.

Jack Dangermouse, ESRI: Wow. You guys are still here? I guess you could open a museum or something.

No, I've got a better idea. Open source some old version of ARCwank that no-one uses. It will make no difference to anyone but the OSGeo guys will implode from the excitement and you'll be doing us a huge favour.

Tristram da Cunha or whatever the fuck that guy at Getmapping is called: Give us the imagery. This one is so obvious I'm almost amazed you haven't done it yet. We cook up some dual licensing stuff for the tracings, so you have the data under do-what-the-fuck-you-want-to conditions and we have it under whatever license we're using that week. We get our Germans to do the reproj into something sane and the hosting, no cost to you. End result is that you get the data three millennia quicker than relying on five people from Basingstoke using the People's Map, and you can still sell it to other guys with beards for much moolah. Come on.

Yahoo: Clearly the Borg will close YMaps and replace it with a skin on VE, just like Multimap, so you might as well go for scorched earth. Now even the ever optimistic El Coasto can't see your lawyers ok'ing a rerelease of the entire TeleAtlas dataset for free... but your code, well that's a different matter.

As you well know all your lovingly crafted render code is going to be subject to rm -rf / as soon as the Microtards move in - actually, no, it'll be del *.*, they still use 8.3 internally y'know - so, give it away and get the freetards on side. The worst that can happen is that someone actually starts using it so you all get lucrative consultancy jobs when the first Borg slice-and-dice hits Yahoo geo. If you're really lucky we might even hire you.

Oh yeah, and one more.

Ed: Don't be evil.

I can has venture capital?

HELLO!!!!!!!!!??

This is a message from Real SteveC. Fake Real SteveC, that is.

Fake^H^H^H^HNick and I have just got €2.4 million to work on OSM.

€2,400,000. That's £1,800,000 for our UK readers and $3,800,000 plus California sales tax for our US readers (pending collapse of your economy, sorry about that). And we're going to give it to some of you guys for development work. And, like, none of you have even noticed.

So I know there are really important discussions to be had about aligning relations with the phase of the moon or some shit but DO YOU MAYBE THINK THIS DESERVES SOME COMMENT? I mean, talk about a bikeshed. Again.

It's up to you, I'm off down the Jolly Gardner. Get there in the next two hours and the drinks are on me. All €2,400,000 of them.

Separated at birth: Ed Parsons and Jeremy Hardy

One is a clown who occasionally appears on Radio 4, the other is a panellist on the News Quiz.