I'm honestly a bit baffled - what do they actually do?
Overture Maps Foundation
11–20 of 30 posts
Re: Overture Maps Foundation
#12It's interesting that this is a consortium of second-tier map providers -- all the commercial enterprises that aren't as good as Google or Mapbox on the web. No ESRI participation on the GIS front. No OpenLayers or Leaflet or Maplibre on the open source front. This reminds me of the Micro Four Thirds model, where smaller camera manufacturers teamed up to fight Canon and Nikon. This looks like a bunch of smaller map c…
All of the founding members generate their own mapping data, and are top tier contributors to OpenStreetMap
https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/8/5/232
Re: Overture Maps Foundation
#13It's interesting that this is a consortium of second-tier map providers -- all the commercial enterprises that aren't as good as Google or Mapbox on the web. No ESRI participation on the GIS front. No OpenLayers or Leaflet or Maplibre on the open source front. This reminds me of the Micro Four Thirds model, where smaller camera manufacturers teamed up to fight Canon and Nikon. This looks like a bunch of smaller map c…
All of the founding members generate their own mapping data, and are top tier contributors to OpenStreetMap https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/8/5/232
I see, thanks for the details! I stand corrected.
Re: Overture Maps Foundation
#14Interesting to see some of the founding members of Overture Maps Foundation are also major sponsors of MapLibre (https://maplibre.org/sponsors/). I wonder if there are plans to unify these 2 communities.
Re: Overture Maps Foundation
#15Interesting to see some of the founding members of Overture Maps Foundation are also major sponsors of MapLibre ( https://maplibre.org/sponsors/ ). I wonder if there are plans to unify these 2 communities.
Looking into it, it seems all founding members sponsor maplibre https://opencollective.com/maplibre (MS is sponsoring via Github sponsors)
Re: Overture Maps Foundation
#16It's interesting that this is a consortium of second-tier map providers -- all the commercial enterprises that aren't as good as Google or Mapbox on the web. No ESRI participation on the GIS front. No OpenLayers or Leaflet or Maplibre on the open source front. This reminds me of the Micro Four Thirds model, where smaller camera manufacturers teamed up to fight Canon and Nikon. This looks like a bunch of smaller map c…
All of the founding members generate their own mapping data, and are top tier contributors to OpenStreetMap https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/8/5/232
So embrace, extend, extinguish?
Maybe if the extinguish google or esri that would be a good thing. Way too many money changers in the spatial domain. It makes me want to found a startup to democratize the democratization of democratized foo.
Re: Overture Maps Foundation
#17There's already a ton of open source tools and map community resources. Why should I trust the consortium set up by Meta et al?
The background here is mostly that these big organizations feel threatened by Google, and issues like the legal/licensure restrictions behind using big open data projects like OpenStreetMap make it hard to commit to using those datasets. They're trying to stay competitive.
What's the licensure/legal restriction in using OpenStreetMap aside from including attribution?
Re: Overture Maps Foundation
#18I'm honestly a bit baffled - what do they actually do?
OpenStreetMap collects data via volunteers entering information about their neighborhoods but there is also government generated data from surveys so I think they aim to automate combining the two in a unified open source format.
Re: Overture Maps Foundation
#19It's interesting that this is a consortium of second-tier map providers -- all the commercial enterprises that aren't as good as Google or Mapbox on the web. No ESRI participation on the GIS front. No OpenLayers or Leaflet or Maplibre on the open source front. This reminds me of the Micro Four Thirds model, where smaller camera manufacturers teamed up to fight Canon and Nikon. This looks like a bunch of smaller map c…
s/a competing standard/a gated community/
Re: Overture Maps Foundation
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
The background here is mostly that these big organizations feel threatened by Google, and issues like the legal/licensure restrictions behind using big open data projects like OpenStreetMap make it hard to commit to using those datasets. They're trying to stay competitive.
What's the licensure/legal restriction in using OpenStreetMap aside from including attribution?
OSM data is licensed via the Open Database License (ODbL) - of particular interest to the folks in this consortium is the `share-alike` provision of that license, which posits that you can make derivative databases of the data (such as augmenting it with other data/metadata) as long as you assign the ODbL to the derivative data.
This is a problem if you have proprietary data that you want to use to augment OSM. Some interpretation here: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Licence_and_Lega...?
tl;dr from that document:
> "...if you improve our data and then distribute it, you need to share your improvements with the general public at no charge. A painless way to do that is to contribute your improvements directly back to OpenStreetMap."