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It is this principle of making you pay for stuff twice that goes on with the British government. Even postcodes and weather data get this tax. In the US if the
by Theodores 6y ago
It is this principle of making you pay for stuff twice that goes on with the British government. Even postcodes and weather data get this tax.
In the US if the federal government makes something then the tax payer has paid for it and it is therefore there for the tax payer to use. So pretty pictures from NASA and the zip code database and even weather observations/predictions are all there for the taking.
In the UK the tax payer has paid for Ordnance Survey already but you have to pay for the maps and get fully extorted to use them in your own publications. There was a time when photocopying an OS map in the library for a planning application was fraught with difficulty.
That is why the Google people were clever with Street View - they built their own maps and are not beholden to OS.
So it is not as if the government goes out of its way to furnish the UK population with the best maps it can. It hoards the map data. It is tantamount to victim blaming to berate those caught on the dales during bad weather with no map other than that which came with the dead battery on their phone.
The OS work for the crown and not the people. If Slow Ways had gone OpenStreetMap you can bet the landing page would have the map around your British house with routes highlighted.
- arethuza 6y agoI think that's being a bit hard on the OS - I think they've been pushed by different governments over the years to become more commercial and hard-nosed about raising revenue wherever they can. I'm actually pretty surprised they haven't been privatised. https://weownit.org.uk/public-ownership/ordnance-survey https://weownit.org.uk/public-ownership/ordnance-survey Edit: OS maps are 'freely' available through Bing Maps.
- timthorn 6y agoThe OS and Met Office (and various other bodies) are established as Trading Funds. That means that they are responsible for their income and expenditure and have to balance their own books - the government pays for services in the same way that the private sector does. If the OS didn't sell its data, the government would have to pay a lot more to have the range and quality of cartographic services that are available. It's also worth saying that government departments are free to purchase mapping (or weather) services from other agencies in the free market, and I've seen OSM based providers winning contracts before. Finally, weather data is made freely available by the Met Office, but it is the forecasts are commercial. The same base data is used by eg Meteo Group for their forecasts.
- gambiting 6y ago>>In the US if the federal government makes something then the tax payer has paid for it and it is therefore there for the tax payer to use. That's absolutely not always the case - just in 2018 the fedral government spent nearly $100 billion dollars[0] of taxpayer money on research, and yet nearly all of the results are locked behind journalistic paywalls or others. [0] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44307.pdf https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44307.pdf
- Symbiote 6y agoI used to work for a similar agency in the UK. This commercialization is a direct result of government policy. They remove funding, and tell agencies to make up the difference in sales. The Tory-LibDem coalition government was the start, and the following governments pushed further for it.
- timthorn 6y agoThe OS was made a Trading Fund under Labour, more than a decade before the Coalition came to power: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1999/965/contents/made https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1999/965/contents/made