One thing that stroked me after the two hackfests we made to develop MapOSMatic: the little amount of code we really developed! In fact, we are re-using a lot of other Free Software.
Using the excellent sloccount, I tried to get some figures. MapOSMatic is about 3150 lines of code, 90% made of Python. MapOSMatic dependencies count for more than 600,000 lines of code, counting PostgreSQL, PostGIS, Apache 2 httpd, Django framework and some small libraries.[1] So we only developed about 0.5% of the code needed to run the MapOSMatic service. And I obviously do not count the OpenStreetMap data itself, which is about 70 GB!
That's why we can say, as most of software developers, that we are standing on the shoulders of giants: we are re-using knowledge, hard-work and polishing of a lot of other people. MapOSMatic is a glaring example of this fact and of the power of Free Software.
Notes
[1] Counting all MapOSMatic dependencies is nearly impossible: it is hard to draw a line between what is part of the system and what is a specific dependency of MapOSMatic (e.g. Python).
