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Here is why you should contribute to OSM even though there are major players profiting from it: OSM is big enough and good enough that all the tech giants (exc
by juliansimioni 5y ago
Here is why you should contribute to OSM even though there are major players profiting from it:
OSM is big enough and good enough that all the tech giants (except Google) would do better to start with OSM and improve it to meet their needs than to start a new, completely proprietary map from scratch.
That means that we are in an amazing place where in addition to the substantial volunteer OSM community, there are contributions from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and hundreds or thousands of smaller companies all coming back in to a single global map that everyone can use. It's very worth it to do work that strengthens OSM, as it increases the number of companies that will use it, and possibly contribute back, rather than doing work the world at large won't benefit from.
P.S. As a disclaimer, I am co-founder of Geocode Earth (https://geocode.earth https://geocode.earth) a small business that does indeed profit from OSM (and other open) data. We also contribute back both through OSM contributions and by releasing our core software as the Pelias geocoder (https://pelias.io https://pelias.io)
- humanistbot 5y agoRight! Remember when Google made their Maps API far more restrictive and it broke a whole bunch of cool applications that were built on top of it? That can't happen with OSM.
- matkoniecz 5y agoYes, would it be really better to be in situation where standard dataset is proprietary and controlled by Google?
- lukeqsee 5y agoI second Julian here, as the founder of another company (in profile) that profits heavily from OSM's data set. It's amazing how good OSM is today, and the rate at which it's expanding and improving means it will only get much better over time.
- alufers 5y agoOSM is so good that even the fire fighters use it in Poland for navigation and finding fire hydrants. The funny thing is that if you modify or add a fire hydrant a guy from the emergency services asks to send a picture of it before he approves the change.
- purple_turtle 5y agoTo clarify: they maintain(ed) own reviewed replica of OSM data and asked about suspicious edits. Any edits in OSM go live immediately without review.
- Tostino 5y agoI feel like this is where there could be some improvements. It would be quite nice to allow a review process to be setup for some types of edits. Plenty of examples in the market to get inspiration from.
- purple_turtle 5y agoIn many areas there is zero or just one local mapper. And vandalism and malicious editing remains rare. That would be enormous effort for minimal benefit.
- Tostino 5y agoThat is fine when the scale for OSM is intentionally small. But if larger companies want to use OSM as a base for their mapping solution while contributing changes upstream, it will be helpful to have that infrastructure setup for merging in changes without issue. Edit: I am not suggesting the existing OSM community build this, if companies want to do this they will put in the effort.
- juliansimioni 5y agoThat's amazing! I know that lots of local and regional governments are trending towards using OSM as their source of truth for data about their area, but hadn't heard that particular story. Love it!
- yepthatsreality 5y agoYep I worked with a popular scooter company in Taiwan to help build software to implement Taiwan’s left hand turn rules into GPS. It was just a matter of labeling the correct intersections. They wanted to eventually share the changes upstream with OSM. Very fun project that I miss very much. Sadly I don’t think the map editing SQLite cli/gui tool made it out to OSS, even though that was a request I had.