OpenStreetMap: Welcome Apple • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenStreetMap: Welcome Apple

#151

Post by intended » Fri, Mar 09, 2012, 9:37 AM UTC

Arelius wrote: post #145

fennecfoxen wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After making this comment I've come back to my 'comments' page from time to time and watched its karma value gyrate between positive and negative. Do the down-mods represent people operating in good faith thinking I'm being mean-spirited, rude, and damaging the conversation? Or are they Apple fanboys upset by a little uncomfortable teasing at their expense? I can only speculate. :P

Personally, I just don't know what to make of your original comment, serious, or sarcastic, the clarity of what you are trying to get across just seems quite low.

Its obviously (to me) sarcastic.

He is probably getting downvoted by people who

1) don't see it as sarcastic 2) Think it detracts from the conversation and encourages behavior of a similar sort.

Re: OpenStreetMap: Welcome Apple

#152

Post by rmc » Fri, Mar 09, 2012, 9:49 AM UTC

stevenp wrote: post #131

rmc wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well these are already their maps. They have styled them, hosting them etc. They are just using the raw underlying OSM data. You have to get data from somewhere, and OSM is probably one of the best sources of data.

Interesting. Does that mean that the companies like Placebase (which Apple acquired) weren't generating their own map data? I guess I just assumed that they were, but the small amount of info I can find on them now makes it seem unclear.

I don't know anything about Placebase (or the other map company Apple acquired at the same time).

But from a practical standpoint, the world is really really bog. "Generating map data" isn't exactly easy, you don't "generate it", you have to "collect it". This isn't like generating a spell checking dictionary, or a a user generated world for a video game. You have to use reality.

The half a million OSM users has been collecting this data for about 8 years now. Either with lots of GPSs or buy tracing satilite/aerial imagery from Yahoo and now Bing (not Google ☹).

To generate it yourself, you need to reproduce all of that above. Google's Street View is a way to reproduce it, since you'll have GPS traces of all the roads, and photos of what the road is like (for street names). OSM covers twice or more times what Google Street View does, so that won't even get you there.

The other option is to pay companies that have already done this, this is what Google Maps (et al.) mostly is, and is also what GPS/SatNav companies do. They get their data from either governmental sources if possible, or from tracing aerial imagery.

All those options are expensive. Why not just use that free OSM data?

This is why OSM was created. To provide a free source of map data to improve humanity.

Re: OpenStreetMap: Welcome Apple

#153

Post by rmc » Fri, Mar 09, 2012, 9:50 AM UTC

fpgeek wrote: post #142

Steko wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this was any other company not a single article would have been written about it in the first place.

Provably false: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/08/microsoft-adds-openst...

Microsoft has been a huge friend to OSM. They have allowed the OSM community to trace stuff from their aerial (but not 'maps'). This is a great way to "armchair map", especially for lots of little roads in the country,.

Re: OpenStreetMap: Welcome Apple

#154

Post by rmc » Fri, Mar 09, 2012, 9:52 AM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #148

rmc wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSM is a database of geographic facts ("There is a road here. It is called Main Street. It is a primary road." etc.) Copyright of databases is non-obvious, so they are switching to a click through database EULA thingie.

Copyright of databases has on several occasions been overturned See Feist V. Rural "The constitutional requirement necessitates independent creation plus a modicum of creativity. Since facts do not owe their origin to an act of authorship, they are not original, and thus are not copyrightable. Although a compilation of facts may possess the requisite originality because the author typically chooses which facts to inc…

And remember that OSM is a global project, that works in many countries, with different interpretations of copyright law. You don't want it to be open in some countries, public domain in others etc etc

Re: OpenStreetMap: Welcome Apple

#155

Post by ZeroGravitas » Fri, Mar 09, 2012, 10:23 AM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #132

ElliotH wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I think it's quite messed up that a company as rich as Apple can't abide putting credits for people who have put some really good work in (I've even made small updates to OSM in my time) I do think that this is a very classy move by the OSM people, no ranting blog post or 'Apple stole our stuff', welcoming people presents a much better image of the project.

It was for stealth. This does not absolve them of their legal and ethical responsibility to give credit where it's due, but it explains their actions above "they're dicks". April 2010 is around when they would have started working on the maps back-end. Attribution would have meant dev releases would have indicated Apple using non-Google Maps data. They probably wanted to avoid that.

It appears they've had these maps in their desktop products since about April 2010, so this explanation doesn't make any sense. (And if it did, then a simple switch to turn on attribution at launch time would have worked too).

Re: OpenStreetMap: Welcome Apple

#156

Post by ZeroGravitas » Fri, Mar 09, 2012, 10:27 AM UTC

rmc wrote: post #6

Shank wrote: post #5

I thought someone compared the terrain with OSM and in certain locations it differs? Edit: They're apparently combining map data in some places.

OSM doesn't have "terrain" (as in hill shading and mountain slopes), but it does have streets and roads. Apple and OSM match up in lots of places. Apple are not using OSM in USA (maybe canada, i dunno), but are definitly using it outside there.

OSM does have terrain, just not in the default map render (which includes most hand-editible data to aid contributers but is often assumed to be the single intended end product). For elevation they re-use SRTM data (and other sources) to create maps with shaded slopes or contours:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/SRTM

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Shaded_relief_maps_using_...

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contours

Re: OpenStreetMap: Welcome Apple

#157

Post by jaakl » Fri, Mar 09, 2012, 10:34 AM UTC

ecopoesis wrote: post #124

sambeau wrote: post #2

"It’s also missing the necessary credit to OpenStreetMap’s contributors; we look forward to working with Apple to get that on there."

Does Apple legally have to give credit? I thought facts couldn't be copyrighted (from the MLB vs fantasy baseball case - http://www.patentarcade.com/2007/11/case-cbc-v-major-league-... ) and wouldn't map data qualify as facts?

Map qualifies as "set of facts" just as much as a photograph of something is representation of a fact. So no, maps are not facts. It is quite subjective model of the world. I would say that OSM is huge collaborative piece of art, and I'm proud to be one of the artists there.

Re: OpenStreetMap: Welcome Apple

#158

Post by rcfox » Fri, Mar 09, 2012, 6:33 PM UTC

reledi wrote: post #150

rcfox wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the university uses a crappy PeopleSoft webapp thing for searching for co-op jobs. It's slow, ugly, and it goes offline every night at midnight. It's terrible. I got fed up with trying to use it, so I looked at the HTML and decided that it was easy enough to parse. I made the deliberate decision to link to the original job descriptions so that you'd still have to log in to find any real information about the jo…

What would have happened if you declined to take the course? Do you think you "learned your lesson", or would you do something like this again if you had the chance?

They added the course as one of my graduation requirements, so I guess I wouldn't have graduated.

The lesson I learned is to not try to make others' lives easier. :P I definitely won't shy away from scraping whatever data sources I can get my hands on, but I probably won't share the results with large groups of people.

Re: OpenStreetMap: Welcome Apple

#159

Post by stephen_g » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 4:13 AM UTC

toyg wrote: post #55

rmc wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With OSM, just start mapping! It's a wiki! http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Beginners%27_guide

That won't help Apple users though -- OP points out that the map data is stale (possibly two years old). It suggests there was a one-off dump at some point which was then used to build the service.

I doubt they would dump once and never update it... Eventually they'll need to update or the maps will be useless...

Re: OpenStreetMap: Welcome Apple

#160

Post by rmc » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 11:53 AM UTC

oconnor0 wrote: post #74

rmc wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No-one really know how far CC goes, and that's one reason OSM is changing licence to a new Open Database Licence (ODbL)

Why wouldn't CC cover this?

Here is an explaination from the OpenStreetMap Foundation on why CC isn't great for OSM: http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/Why_CC_BY-SA_is_Un...