4 ms·

My experience with the more extreme OSM folks is that as soon as you are working for a large company, you are no longer a member of the community. More generall

My experience with the more extreme OSM folks is that as soon as you are working for a large company, you are no longer a member of the community. More generally, there is nothing the big companies could do to make them happy, short of divesting completely from OSM so that they can get their hobby project from 2008 back.

Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
I’m sure you can find any given opinion in a community of 2m registered users with a public mailing list, especially any community which includes a bunch of 17-year old Linux enthusiasts, but it’s not remotely representative of the OSM community nor a particularly useful subset to identify.
- kevinventullo 5y ago
  I agree they are not representative of the community, but they are a quite vocal minority, to whom anyone working on OSM in a corporate context is well-acquainted. I offer my observations as a warning to take any anti-corporate sentiment from self-proclaimed OSM community representatives with a grain of salt.
  - Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
    I’d fully agree with the latter. Sometimes (often) a gobshite on a mailing list is just a gobshite on a mailing list. (He says, looking anxiously at his own 2000 list postings over 17 years.) The lists are sometimes attributed a significance they don’t really have any more - they have a few hundred subscribers max in a massive project. Most of the OSM US community discussion happens on Slack, in Germany it’s a webforum, some countries use Telegram and so on.
betwixthewires 5y ago
I've never talked to anyone like this, not sure where you get it from. You get people that are suspicious and cautious about big corp sponsorship of OSM, and rightly so, EEE was and still is a thing. But in OSM, contributors are contributors, plain and simple.
- kevinventullo 5y ago
  I get it from personal experience having once worked on OSM for a big company. Next time you’re at an OSM conference, strike up a conversation with anyone from a big tech company and ask about folks like this, I’m sure they’ll have plenty of stories. Better yet, go to their talk and watch the Q&A session get derailed by some guy who’s mad about the way a bike path was tagged.

Doctor_Fegg 5y ago

I’m sure you can find any given opinion in a community of 2m registered users with a public mailing list, especially any community which includes a bunch of 17-year old Linux enthusiasts, but it’s not remotely representative of the OSM community nor a particularly useful subset to identify.

kevinventullo 5y ago
I agree they are not representative of the community, but they are a quite vocal minority, to whom anyone working on OSM in a corporate context is well-acquainted. I offer my observations as a warning to take any anti-corporate sentiment from self-proclaimed OSM community representatives with a grain of salt.
- Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
  I’d fully agree with the latter. Sometimes (often) a gobshite on a mailing list is just a gobshite on a mailing list. (He says, looking anxiously at his own 2000 list postings over 17 years.) The lists are sometimes attributed a significance they don’t really have any more - they have a few hundred subscribers max in a massive project. Most of the OSM US community discussion happens on Slack, in Germany it’s a webforum, some countries use Telegram and so on.

betwixthewires 5y ago

I've never talked to anyone like this, not sure where you get it from. You get people that are suspicious and cautious about big corp sponsorship of OSM, and rightly so, EEE was and still is a thing. But in OSM, contributors are contributors, plain and simple.

kevinventullo 5y ago
I get it from personal experience having once worked on OSM for a big company. Next time you’re at an OSM conference, strike up a conversation with anyone from a big tech company and ask about folks like this, I’m sure they’ll have plenty of stories. Better yet, go to their talk and watch the Q&A session get derailed by some guy who’s mad about the way a bike path was tagged.