341–350 of 374 posts
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It has been years since I gave them a try. Their interface was horrible, but this is a good reason to try them again.
Regardless of what the sibling comment says, the editing UX is really good now. Their editor has a beautiful walkthrough and easy-to-use tools, at least on desktop: https://www.openstreetmap.org/edit
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You are correct. The reverse is true too, why should contribute data to their maps service for free? I've done lot of work to add and correct roads, update business info and addresses in my area. If they want to fill the map with ads they have that right - but when they drive me (and people like me) away, their product will suffer.
Why didn't you contribute to OpenStreetMap?
In what way aren't they bold enough? Their license is too restrictive for many commercial uses, driving big businesses (apple, Google, Microsoft) and their users away.
They don't use crowdsourced data. You're never going to be able to build real-time traffic maps by manual means.. They need to make a platform to anonymously share user data so other volunteers can write automated code to turn it into real-time map features.
Likewise, they might not have the resources for street view, but I bet a few million people submitting their photo library would get a photograph of a substantial number of buildings... Then it's just about code to sort, classify, tag, and arrange the images to be useful.
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Why didn't you contribute to OpenStreetMap?
OpenStreetMap's leadership isn't bold enough to ever become the leading map provider. I don't want to contribute (for free) unless I think one day my work will impact millions of people. In what way aren't they bold enough? Their license is too restrictive for many commercial uses, driving big businesses (apple, Google, Microsoft) and their users away. They don't use crowdsourced data. You're never going to be able t…
OSM already impacts the lives of millions of people. Indeed, it genuinely saves lives through its humanitarian work, and has been doing so since the Haiti earthquake.
What you appear to be saying is that it doesn’t provide motorist-centric features like “real-time traffic maps”. As someone who thinks the world would be a whole bunch better if there were fewer cars, I’m good with that.
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Open Streetmap doesn’t build laser scanning drones, or fleets of connected 360 camera vehicles, or the tech and infrastructure to do the mapping. SOMEONE has to build all of that. It can’t be free. If it’s govt funded, then there WILL be corruption, scams, and it’ll be run as well as the DMV.
I don't know about laser-scanning drones but for street-level imagery Mapillary and OpenStreetCam do the job. That is, if they have users around the area you're interested in.
I'll go for OSC for future projects. Thanks for sharing.
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Regardless of what the sibling comment says, the editing UX is really good now. Their editor has a beautiful walkthrough and easy-to-use tools, at least on desktop: https://www.openstreetmap.org/edit
But is lacking pretty badly on mobile... Exactly the device people have with them when out in the real world...
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> Forced to close? Why? That's a terrible authoritarian idea. I don't believe "authoritarian" applies to companies. If anything corporatism is authoritarian.
What exactly does "force to close" mean and how does it work in a free-market capitalist society then? If there are valid regulations to follow then sure but that's not what the parent comment seems to be suggesting.
There's no "free-market capitalist society". Just a really-existing capitalist society (like "really-existing socialism" which touted one set of values, but practiced another), that sells to people the lie that markets are (and can be) free, when they aren't in most ways that matters.
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> Forced to close? Why? That's a terrible authoritarian idea. I don't believe "authoritarian" applies to companies. If anything corporatism is authoritarian.
"Authoritarian" is when you're the one pointing guns at people (and companies) in order to make them do what you say is best.
Except if you think e.g. forbidding them from using child labor or from not hiring women/blacks etc. are authoritarian too, then you already agree that a society can impose some laws (onto companies), and them to not be authoritarian.
If you agree to the above, then now the main difference is that you think the above examples are "fair" and "ok", whereas the other proposal is not. But that's a matter of opinion, not some objective truth.
Meanwhile... MapKit.js has “a free daily limit of 250,000 map views and 25,000 service calls” https://developer.apple.com/maps/mapkitjs/
If I can't use it on the desktop, though, it's not much good to me. Edited to answer daveidol's question due to ridiculous HN rate-limiting: Apple doesn't license Apple Maps for anything other than their own mobile platforms as far as I can tell. It can't be used as a general-purpose Google Maps replacement.
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But is lacking pretty badly on mobile... Exactly the device people have with them when out in the real world...
True, I think one of the things Google Maps does very cleverly is making it really easy for users to suggest corrections, often just a single tap away. That said, OSMand has been making great strides usability-wise, and though it's still pretty lacking, hopefully it'll get there some day too.
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Because the private sector is free of corruption and scams? The UK ordnance survey[1] is government run and is generally fantastic. They cover every inch of the UK in excruciating detail, provide centimeter precise GPS coordinates for everything and publish invaluable, cheap maps of it all. Why do you assume that the seemingly inept and corrupt US standard is the baseline that everything else will be? 1. https://en.m…
Their maps were probably world-leading in the 90's. Now though, I feel like the tech giants have overtaken them. Where is the street view or 3d models? Where are the opening times of every shop? Where is the traffic congestion info? Where is the ability to look up a house number and find where on the street it is? These are all things I regularly want to know and are location based, so really ought to be part of a ma…
That will probably never get done in a OSS manner at the scale of google, and even if it was serving it would probably be enormously expensive.
> 3d models
A lot of 3d models are in OSM, although not as detailed as in proprietary solutions.
> opening times of every shop
This is not something I want in the same database as the location data. The hope is that more sites/services use discovarable technologies lite microdata to make sure that it can be added to the map via separate databases.
> traffic congestion info
Again, real-time info is not really something I want in the same db as the actual street. traffic congestion info is a very different service than location or mapping info.
> look up a house number
This is part of the OSM offering, look into nominatim