Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

ctrl.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 224 posts

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#151

Post by betwixthewires »

tapiok wrote: post #127
burkaman wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes: https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/ > nearly 17% of the global road network was last edited by a corporate data-team member.

...and their share of edits is growing. Maybe one day OSM mappers will wake up and realize they provide free labor to corporate giants that sucks economic value from community. Hopefully it will be not too late.

As a user of OSM (and having contributed in the past but that's not relevant to my point) it looks like, to me, that if their share of edits is growing that they are providing free labor to me and people like me, no?

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#152

Post by yepthatsreality »

juliansimioni wrote: post #51

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 con…

Yep 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.

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#153

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

Brakenshire wrote: post #143
pcthrowaway wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the permissive vs. free software license debate. In practice there are people who won't be able to use the data for their use case if a non-permissive license is applied.

I find the distinction difficult to understand. The way I interpret the OSM license, the data is really not freely available to use in a commercial context except as a base layer. If you use the OSM data in combination with any other data sources you have to publish both the resulting dataset and any processing steps or algorithms used to produce the dataset. So that means you cannot combine OSM data with any dataset…

It’s more complex than that. OSM’s licence isn’t a direct parallel of one single software licence, but it has an LGPL-ish permissive aspect for making things from the data (“Produced Works”).

OSM data is used a lot for routing (pretty much all bike navigation apart from Google’s uses OSM data) and increasingly for GIS-type analysis.

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#154

Post by Tostino »

purple_turtle wrote: post #136
alufers wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSM 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.

To clarify: they maintain(ed) own reviewed replica of OSM data and asked about suspicious edits. Any edits in OSM go live immediately without review.

I 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.

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#155

Post by betwixthewires »

maceurt wrote: post #101
throw8932894 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy ship has sailed long time ago. Try to remove license plates from your car. Or refuse to share information about your health! Now it is about gate keeping. Young people and startups, need the same ability as govs and established players. Until recently you could not even embed maps on your website (too expensive). Free data are levelling the playing field. And if anything OpenStreetMap helps me not to share my…

If we created a change we can un-create it. People who just accept that we are powerless to our past are the architects of our future hell. > I can store map of entire continent offline on my phone, and do not have to ask remote servers for navigation! The fact that you think anybody would need to have that is ridiculous. And also I can store an entire map of pretty much any place I need to go to and it doesn't requi…

I need to store the map of the entire US locally on my phone, because often, where I want to go has no service because where I go is very, very rural. If I were to do this with paper maps it would cost me hundreds of dollars. As a bonus, I can overlay the map with USGS GIS data and see all sorts of information about where I'm going, again, stored locally on my phone. I can tell you right now in about 30 seconds what federal or state agency manages any GPS coordinate and how to get there in a car, and if I need information like that, which I do, I can get it in the middle of the grand canyon a hundred miles from the nearest cell tower.

People do need it. You're dismissing very, very powerful tools just to complain that your city isn't walkable, forgetting that some of us don't live anywhere remotely resembling a city at all. There's a whole world out here man.

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#156

Post by betwixthewires »

yosito wrote: post #21

This article is a bit scattered. But it makes one good point: Big Tech companies are profiting off of the OSM data set, while employing no one working on OSM. How do we change that?

These companies contribute ~17% of worldwide road change updates, if that's not employing anyone to work on OSM then what exactly do you mean by "work on OSM?"

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#157

Post by kelnos »

This sounds like another tired variation on the "open source is dead" article that popped up here a few weeks ago.

People contribute to things for free for a variety of reasons. I've made only a couple contributions to OSM, but I'm happy to do so. The world needs freely available mapping data. Sure, the companies that benefit from it the most may not contribute financially or with manpower (just like with most open source), but that doesn't change the usefulness of OSM.

I'd much rather we have something like OSM than have all this data locked up behind paywalls and contracts. Who does and doesn't support the work is irrelevant to me.

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#158

Post by ciphol »

tapiok wrote: post #127
burkaman wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes: https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/ > nearly 17% of the global road network was last edited by a corporate data-team member.

...and their share of edits is growing. Maybe one day OSM mappers will wake up and realize they provide free labor to corporate giants that sucks economic value from community. Hopefully it will be not too late.

Corporations, whether giant or not, create products which people chose to purchase because they are useful. That's creating value, not sucking value.

Sometimes a corporation can "suck value" by using anticompetitive behavior to prevent competitors from offering better/cheaper products to consumers. But in this case, Google is the big corporation, and contributions to OSM benefit smaller competitors at the expense of Google, creating more options and more value for consumers overall.

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#160

Post by fdr »

I recently picked up OSM mapping. The tools are way better than ten years ago when I had a look: I like both the web editor and the "Go Map!!" iOS application. My motivation is mostly so that I can have accurate results when visiting or re-visiting a place. In a few months (or weeks), the sheer number of OSM consumers allow you to receive the benefit of your own changes. Write once, read everywhere.

I don't advance this is necessarily sufficient or OSM is getting a great deal for its value, but it's what got me involved after a long period watching from the sidelines: it was a wise suggestion from an AllTrails staff member on a support ticket.

Post reply on HN