Wednesday 12 March 2008

Freetards plan get together

Like a band of sheet clad Druids flocking to a dirty stone in a wet field to hear the non-sensical murmurings of the Druid King, the beardy freetard map-bashing brigade otherwise known as OpenStreetMap will be convening in a dirty hotel room in Limerick, Ireland, to hear the equally non-sensical murmurings of their own Druid King, the great El Coasto.

Pause for a moment and think about how we do things at the Big G. Where do you think the idea of location came from anyway? I didn't come up with it sitting on the toilet, I got it from a student's essay back in the 'ston days. The color of the second 'o' in Google? From a community arts project in the Mission. Free lunches for employees? Got the idea after overhearing Jim Goodnight in a restaurant in Seattle in 1977.

Show-and-tell sessions like this are great for us - its outsourcing of innovation. We give the freetards a bit of cash to pay for some lentil soup and a vegetable burrito at lunchtime, send some of our marketing drones down there with some shiny stickers and then sit back and suck it all in. Got a cool idea? Tell us about it!

Now compare a freetard gathering like the StateoftheMap to a Google operation like a Developer Day. I don't get on stage and tell you how to make my secret sauce, I use the secret sauce to give away even more ad supported burgers. Everyone knows your only open when you're losing.

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