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Traditional encyclopedias didn't lose because of their intellectual property model, they lost because they were trying to charge money for their product, so a f
by s17n 7y ago
Traditional encyclopedias didn't lose because of their intellectual property model, they lost because they were trying to charge money for their product, so a free as in beer competitor was able to take all their market share.
A maps data set will require constant updating and the quality of the data set will be determined by the amount of work put into it on an ongoing basis. The question is which number is bigger: the monetary value of the time people are willing to donate making contributions to openstreetmap, or the amount of money that Google makes on map ads and can therefore spend improving the data quality.
- mantap 7y agoThere are parts of the world that have much better OSM coverage than Google maps, e.g eastern Indonesia. I don't think OSM is ever going to beat Google in for instance New York City but it absolutely can and does beat Google in parts of the world that are not profitable for Google to map. That's the problem with a for-profit map: consistency.
- codeka 7y agoThe exact same problem exists with volunteer-maintained maps. In fact it's even worse there because at least with a commercial map, quality is basically correlated with where the users are. With a volunteer-maintained map, quality is correlated with where the volunteers are, which is not necessarily going to be where the users are.
- carlinmack 7y agoThousands of volunteers specifically map remote areas they don't live in through the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team
- dmihal 7y agoEvery local municipality already maintains GIS data, I imagine that some day these systems will automatically integrate into a public, open database like OSM. Sidenote, the FOAM project is doing some interesting work into geospacial data on-the-blockchain.
- namibj 7y agoAt a regular (bi)monthly/quarterly OSM meetup we were joined by representatives from 2 or 3 local municipalities. It seems they might be interested in unification to reduce costs, but I didn't ask for details.