Thank you Jacob!

This feels like a good place to mention that I saw that Overture is hiring their next Executive Director. Would be great to see someone with enthusiasm for OSM and the partnership potential there to help further address the topics raised in this diary - maybe someone writing or reading this post ;) - https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/LinuxFoundation/744000065513265-executive-director,-overture-maps-foundation

Two things that might impact that: 1. He mentioned at least some (much?) of the data is in deep archive, so that pricing is cheaper than the standard AWS glacier pricing. 2. It also depends on the storage region. US-East (Ohio) is a relatively cheap region that gets to $137/month for 112 TB: https://calculator.aws/#/estimate?id=dff1371f1b7fcf2fd0052b866692ac5edf241fb2 - whereas in northern california, that same storage wouldbe $260/month. I’d assume they’re storing in a very cheap region.

To my knowledge, there’s no assurance that Amazon’s sponsorship will be perpetual, and transitioning away later could come with considerable costs and complexities. It’s free until the day it isn’t.

Fair enough, but Grant’s post covered this, though without pointing it out directly. Most of the data is in “deep archive” - in AWS Glacier. That’s much cheaper than Backblaze B2. I say this as someone that very much prefers B2 to AWS, but for backups that are infrequently or unlikely to be retrieved, AWS Glacier is the cost to beat. Even without parsing the words in his post, we can see this - 112 TB for $120/month for that first item is significantly cheaper than the equivalent in B2 ($560/month). So, even if the sponsorship goes away, we don’t need to transition out because OSM is still getting the best cost for storage.

That doesn’t overrule your ethical concerns, but on every level I can see, they’re currently making the smart choice for OSM’s financial resources.

I encourage anyone who reads this post to go read the original thread as this post repeatedly misrepresents numerous facts: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/why-does-osmf-budget-25-000-on-amazon/102475

A few items: * Nobody was silenced. The thread was temporarily locked for everyone to cool things down. It helped. You’re free to go post further questions there now. * As I said in the thread - the transparency you want can be achieved without accusing people of making bad decisions. Everything here could have been easily achieved by asking questions and listening to the answers. You haven’t appeared to do either one and continue to blame others in this post without truly accounting for yourself. Regardless, you received the information you were looking for - something you don’t mention here. Your request was not met with indifference, but instead was met with a full accounting of every bit of AWS usage by OSM. You weren’t entitled to this, but were provided with it because the people involved clearly agreed with you that transparency is good. Everyone seems to agree on that despite what you assert here. Instead of responding to receiving the information you asked for in the thread you started, you’re posting here stating that people didn’t care about your concerns. I’m genuinely confused by this. * I’m also confused as to why you continue to assert that OSM spends 24k Euros on AWS when that has been repeatedly shown not to be the case. This is false information that you keep repeating. Graham explicitly stated numerous times that those costs are donated to OSM by Amazon and are not recoverable as cash. No money is being spent by OSM on these services. You received the transparency you’ve been asking for, but continue to ignore that the the information has been provided to you. Why?

I agree with Simon. It sounds like taking a break to reflect on your own actions would be a good thing.