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> The post calls for OSM to essentially become Mapbox The problem is that most companies using OSM are using Mapbox. This leads to a few problems, including at

> The post calls for OSM to essentially become Mapbox The problem is that most companies using OSM are using Mapbox. This leads to a few problems, including attribution, which I decided not to touch on, but is a serious problem that Mapbox doesn't address sufficiently. If they could use OSM directly, they'd be engaged with OSM directly. They'd care about OSM. Right now OSM shoves these users away and makes them into customers of some third party (maybe Mapbox, maybe someone else) instead of caring about OSM itself. > Expanding the scope of OpenStreetMap to include transient data. Too much other work to do, maybe later for this. How about letting users experiment and seeing what cool stuff they can come up with?

andrewljohnson 9y ago
> The problem is that most companies using OSM are using Mapbox. Is that even true? And is number of companies even a good metric? Based on revenue/market cap, the bulk of companies use OSM directly. The world's biggest company (Apple) uses OSM directly. Telenav uses it directly. Don't Tesla and Uber use OSM directly too? And we use Mapbox at Gaia GPS, but we also use OSM data directly. > How about letting users experiment and seeing what cool stuff they can come up with? In my experience building a company, if you focus on too many things, you get everything wrong. This smells to me of being not on target for making OSM as strong as possible, even though it has alluring upside.
- y4mi 9y ago
  > The world's biggest company (Apple) uses OSM directly sigh apple zealots... its big, i give you that, but sure as hell ain't the biggest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...
  - andrewljohnson 9y ago
    Largest by market cap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...
    - y4mi 9y ago
      a) biggest company does not equal company with highest market cap b) having the biggest market cap is something thats good for their shareholder, and terrible for anyone else. But yeah, do continue to praise your beloved highness.
      - coldtea 9y ago
        >a) biggest company does not equal company with highest market cap Actually it does. Especially since you can have 1 billion in revenue by selling $10 dollar bills at $1 dollar. >b) having the biggest market cap is something thats good for their shareholder, and terrible for anyone else Whatever. >But yeah, do continue to praise your beloved highness. Irrational argument ad hominem.
        ghaff 9y ago
        Well, "biggest" can mean a number of different things but, given that this is an Internet comment board and not an audited financial report, market cap seems one perfectly reasonable measure.
        coldtea 9y ago
        My sentiments exactly.
        thaumasiotes 9y ago
        Market cap would be a reasonable measure for "biggest public company". It's an awful measure for "biggest company", since private companies have no market cap. This was discussed a while ago in relation to Saudi Aramco's potential partial IPO. Saudi Aramco is huge, much bigger than Apple, with no market cap.
        JumpCrisscross 9y ago
        > private companies have no market cap They absolutely do. They're just updated less frequently and called "valuations". Closely-held private companies also have valuations, they're just even less frequently made visible.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    Revenue? Wallmart gets that making pennies in every sale. And with 2.3M employees -- Apple does half that revenue for 1/20 the employees -- and has 2-3 times the market cap (Walmart is not even in the top 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by... ).
- nxc18 9y ago
  Tesla is a MapBox customer. https://electrek.co/2017/07/03/tesla-map-navigation-open-source-platforms/ https://electrek.co/2017/07/03/tesla-map-navigation-open-sou...
- toyg 9y ago
  In the post, he says this is ok for some (implying the giants you mention) but it discourages smaller companies. That second (and likely much bigger) set of people use Mapbox.
djsumdog 9y ago
I mean, I realize hosting a service is expensive, but can't there be an open source set of service APIs that's self hosted? That way you can chose to get a full copy of the data (and be responsible for pulling updates) and the API, or just pay someone else for access to their hosted version of the API?
- michaelt 9y ago
  can't there be an open source set of service APIs that's self hosted OSM does have open source self-hosted options. Unfortunately, the developer experience is much more painful than using Google Maps. With Google Maps, if you can add Javascript to a web page you're basically good to go. Data updates, software updates, server redundancy, server support and security, all taken care of. Even if you're exclusively a front-end dev, you're making a static site, and you've never heard of Linux. Compared to that, self-hosting OSM tile generation requires a bunch of extra knowledge, equipment and maintenance.
  - chuckdries 9y ago
    Is it something that could be containerized? Maybe not as simple as a JS embed, but deploying a self hosted docker container is far easier than installing most things I've encountered.
    - petre 9y ago
      With vector tiles one doesn't have to containerize anything - just shard them onto a bunch of servers and server them over https. Put an accelerator/cache in front and proxy to the desired region backend. With image tiles it's a hurdle. You have to build 18 zoom levels of tiles. The most detailed layers have an astronomic number if tiles. You also need a huge amount if storage. http://tools.geofabrik.de/calc/#type=geofabrik_standard&bbox=5.538062,47.236312,15.371071,54.954 http://tools.geofabrik.de/calc/#type=geofabrik_standard&bbox... Did I mention the data being huge? What's the point of having 15Tb container, which takes forever to deploy? You can certainly containerize the services, but there's no benefit containerizing the data, since you have to replace it all at once rather than synchronizing the differences.

andrewljohnson 9y ago

> The problem is that most companies using OSM are using Mapbox. Is that even true? And is number of companies even a good metric? Based on revenue/market cap, the bulk of companies use OSM directly. The world's biggest company (Apple) uses OSM directly. Telenav uses it directly. Don't Tesla and Uber use OSM directly too? And we use Mapbox at Gaia GPS, but we also use OSM data directly. > How about letting users experiment and seeing what cool stuff they can come up with? In my experience building a company, if you focus on too many things, you get everything wrong. This smells to me of being not on target for making OSM as strong as possible, even though it has alluring upside.

y4mi 9y ago
> The world's biggest company (Apple) uses OSM directly sigh apple zealots... its big, i give you that, but sure as hell ain't the biggest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...
- andrewljohnson 9y ago
  Largest by market cap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...
  - y4mi 9y ago
    a) biggest company does not equal company with highest market cap b) having the biggest market cap is something thats good for their shareholder, and terrible for anyone else. But yeah, do continue to praise your beloved highness.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      >a) biggest company does not equal company with highest market cap Actually it does. Especially since you can have 1 billion in revenue by selling $10 dollar bills at $1 dollar. >b) having the biggest market cap is something thats good for their shareholder, and terrible for anyone else Whatever. >But yeah, do continue to praise your beloved highness. Irrational argument ad hominem.
      - ghaff 9y ago
        Well, "biggest" can mean a number of different things but, given that this is an Internet comment board and not an audited financial report, market cap seems one perfectly reasonable measure.
        coldtea 9y ago
        My sentiments exactly.
        thaumasiotes 9y ago
        Market cap would be a reasonable measure for "biggest public company". It's an awful measure for "biggest company", since private companies have no market cap. This was discussed a while ago in relation to Saudi Aramco's potential partial IPO. Saudi Aramco is huge, much bigger than Apple, with no market cap.
        JumpCrisscross 9y ago
        > private companies have no market cap They absolutely do. They're just updated less frequently and called "valuations". Closely-held private companies also have valuations, they're just even less frequently made visible.
- coldtea 9y ago
  Revenue? Wallmart gets that making pennies in every sale. And with 2.3M employees -- Apple does half that revenue for 1/20 the employees -- and has 2-3 times the market cap (Walmart is not even in the top 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by... ).
nxc18 9y ago
Tesla is a MapBox customer. https://electrek.co/2017/07/03/tesla-map-navigation-open-source-platforms/ https://electrek.co/2017/07/03/tesla-map-navigation-open-sou...
toyg 9y ago
In the post, he says this is ok for some (implying the giants you mention) but it discourages smaller companies. That second (and likely much bigger) set of people use Mapbox.

djsumdog 9y ago

I mean, I realize hosting a service is expensive, but can't there be an open source set of service APIs that's self hosted? That way you can chose to get a full copy of the data (and be responsible for pulling updates) and the API, or just pay someone else for access to their hosted version of the API?

michaelt 9y ago
can't there be an open source set of service APIs that's self hosted OSM does have open source self-hosted options. Unfortunately, the developer experience is much more painful than using Google Maps. With Google Maps, if you can add Javascript to a web page you're basically good to go. Data updates, software updates, server redundancy, server support and security, all taken care of. Even if you're exclusively a front-end dev, you're making a static site, and you've never heard of Linux. Compared to that, self-hosting OSM tile generation requires a bunch of extra knowledge, equipment and maintenance.
- chuckdries 9y ago
  Is it something that could be containerized? Maybe not as simple as a JS embed, but deploying a self hosted docker container is far easier than installing most things I've encountered.
  - petre 9y ago
    With vector tiles one doesn't have to containerize anything - just shard them onto a bunch of servers and server them over https. Put an accelerator/cache in front and proxy to the desired region backend. With image tiles it's a hurdle. You have to build 18 zoom levels of tiles. The most detailed layers have an astronomic number if tiles. You also need a huge amount if storage. http://tools.geofabrik.de/calc/#type=geofabrik_standard&bbox=5.538062,47.236312,15.371071,54.954 http://tools.geofabrik.de/calc/#type=geofabrik_standard&bbox... Did I mention the data being huge? What's the point of having 15Tb container, which takes forever to deploy? You can certainly containerize the services, but there's no benefit containerizing the data, since you have to replace it all at once rather than synchronizing the differences.