4 ms·
Ordnance Survey maps are fairly well done (as good as other sovereign efforts), but the UK's approach to map licensing has probably hurt the country economicall
by andrewljohnson 7y ago
Ordnance Survey maps are fairly well done (as good as other sovereign efforts), but the UK's approach to map licensing has probably hurt the country economically and heavily limited distribution of OS maps. OS is maybe the most antiquated map licensing agency I've ever tried to work with.
In the US, you can get the USGS maps for free. In Switzerland or France, you can get SwissTopo or France IGN in a manageable way for reasonable licensing fees. In Australia, it's a little complex, but you can go province by province and license the maps, sometimes for free. Many, many countries provide high quality maps for free or reasonable fees.
But Ordnance Survey's maps are incredibly expensive to license, hard to administer/govern, and can't be purchased for much less (if less at all) than OS charges in their own (terrible) app. And thus aren't in my app like so many others are.
The US approach to making USGS maps public domain has created enormous economic growth. This is a nice paper on the economics of maps: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.34.1.196 https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.34.1.196
- jakear 7y agoThanks for your work on Gaia! I’ve been a happy premium user for almost a year now. The US public land maps are invaluable, especially in times like these. Edit: Just saw your post about bringing Gaia to CarPlay. That’s something I’d always wanted but my car no longer supports it. Bummer. Nice work though! Edit again: Any chance of getting cellular coverage layers?
- andrewljohnson 7y agoThanks! I made a policy to stop commenting on our roadmap, but I know someone internally is tinkering with a cellular coverage layer and it might get shipped someday ;)
- alearright 7y agoit is awesome so cool https://coolmathunblocked.weebly.com/ https://coolmathunblocked.weebly.com/ https://tyronesunblockedgames.weebly.com/ https://tyronesunblockedgames.weebly.com/
- n4r9 7y agoThis is all true but it's worth bearing in mind that OS recently made a lot of its mapping data open: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/tools-support/open-data-support https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/tools-s.... If you ask me it's probably because their expensive licencing was causing businesses to switch to open alternatives like OSM where possible. My company is generally working towards the latter for this reason as well as the fact that it's a global dataset.