Mr Arrington – shut it before you look like more of a fool

Dear Mr. Arrington:

I know you may be smart in other areas but you are making a fool of yourself with the cloudmade/ OSM  post. I know your shoody piece was based off:

“a random discussion I had with someone about how they are doing. And by “they” I mean the combination of CM with OSM.”

But I thought quoting random discussions as fact was the purview of bloggers not journalists or larger sites such as techcrunch. Hey I have an idea, how about you name the source or at least give them credit.

But this statement is the one that shows you are way out of your league in this discussion:

“it’s quite clear who controls the project.”

My friend, cloudmade does anything but come close to control the project. They have offered some APIs on top of OSM and had a few mapping parties, but most of the contributors to the OSM project and the infrastructure are not affiliated or given by cloudmade.

During the Haiti crisis cloudmade was shamefully quiet. Most of the work was done by volunteers like Schuyler, Chris S, Mikel and hundreds of others. They did not use the cloudmade front-end and there was no direction being given by cloudmade.

Please stop wanking and give some real facts to back up your statements. Show me the infrastructure that cloudmade gives to OSM, or the volunteers they give, or any objective measure. I would say for everyone in the community it is quite clear that OSM is marginally connected to cloudmade at best. So my summary of:

“cutting through the bs and getting to the core issues.”

is

1)  You are out of your league when discussing geo

2) You are wrong and can’t admit it

3) OSM is not run by and barely has much of a connection to cloudmade.