41–50 of 224 posts
no. I wish osm would adjust their licensing to prevent reuse of contributions to build non free (as in open) servicing.
I've enjoyed Google Maps for many years and never paid for it. Apple MapKit appears to be free. I improve the experience for others when I help improve the maps and in turn my experience is improved by the contributions of others. It's costs Google and Apple money to provide the infrastructure for this, which they obtain in various ways such as advertising. It doesn't bother me if someone wants to advertise their sto…
Question: if I contribute a fix to Google Maps or Apple Maps, does that fix back-propogate to OSM? My home address needs to be slightly shifted and wondering for best practice.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/FAQ#Why_don.27t_you_just...
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?
Apple and Microsoft do contribute a lot of data back to OSM though, as pointed out in the article, and they help fund it. OSM doesn’t employ anyone full time, but there are Apple and MS employees that contribute to OSM near or actually full time. So what exactly is it you think needs changing?
(Open Street Map Foundation has very limited employees and contractors, see https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Contractors_and_employee... )
I've enjoyed Google Maps for many years and never paid for it. Apple MapKit appears to be free. I improve the experience for others when I help improve the maps and in turn my experience is improved by the contributions of others. It's costs Google and Apple money to provide the infrastructure for this, which they obtain in various ways such as advertising. It doesn't bother me if someone wants to advertise their sto…
Question: if I contribute a fix to Google Maps or Apple Maps, does that fix back-propogate to OSM? My home address needs to be slightly shifted and wondering for best practice.
At this point, I don't really consider OSM an OSS project, but an infrastructure. It has small value for everyone, but all combined usage, it has immense economical value for the society. All alone, it's not really useful to end-users, but it can help a lot of businesses that couldn't exist before it. Maps are already considered infrastructure, since they are already made by governments! The only missing part to say…
> The only missing part to say OSM is an infrastructure, is for governments to actually contribute to it. The best way to contribute is to openly license government datasets, and many such datasets are already in use and being used to improve OSM (and often problems are reported back, resulting in fixes in official datasets!). Government official editing directly would be in many cases more harmful than useful.
Ideally, governments would simply pay OSM people to do it on their own, but eh, we know this can never happen, and even if it did, greedy people might be tempted by that kind of money and would go into the OSM community just for that.
I hesitate because ultimately I cannot fully silence my ego. I want to release my content and have a positive impact on game creators. I know my ideas and hard work will be taken and rebroadcast by other teacher content creators without credit. In abstract that my ideas will spread to a wider audience will maximize its impact. ...But I want my hard work to be recognized and credited which is hamstringing my willingness to release.
My ego wants me to keep this information private and work in a closed source way. "Ha, I am so smart that I grok this stuff and can apply it," I imagine my mindset saying. "Look at how these fools struggle, ignorant of a better way." However; I have benefited from others making the brave choice to work in an open source way.
How do people who give away their work (MIT or CC license) think about it? I feel like a jerk for benefiting from a culture of open source and yet I have this inner conflict?
At this point, I don't really consider OSM an OSS project, but an infrastructure. It has small value for everyone, but all combined usage, it has immense economical value for the society. All alone, it's not really useful to end-users, but it can help a lot of businesses that couldn't exist before it. Maps are already considered infrastructure, since they are already made by governments! The only missing part to say…
> The only missing part to say OSM is an infrastructure, is for governments to actually contribute to it. The best way to contribute is to openly license government datasets, and many such datasets are already in use and being used to improve OSM (and often problems are reported back, resulting in fixes in official datasets!). Government official editing directly would be in many cases more harmful than useful.
Second best way to contribute is to force commercial corporations to share the datasets they have of what is essentially public data - what is in the physical world and where. Currently, I see a lot of this kind of data on Google Maps, but not on OSM (e.g. location of various cultural and commercial venues, public transportation lines and schedules etc.)
And by "force" I mean something like legislation or regulation.
About 10 years ago I helped build a piece of software that would use OSM data and that data needed to be precise. Turned out that a lot of the Tiger Maps scans were not super accurate so I urged our company to hire a data entry team to clean up a bunch of it. We had I think 5 or 6 people whose job it was to precisely clean up OSM data based on satellite imagery in a bunch of small-medium cities as well as Chicago. Ev…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The only missing part to say OSM is an infrastructure, is for governments to actually contribute to it. The best way to contribute is to openly license government datasets, and many such datasets are already in use and being used to improve OSM (and often problems are reported back, resulting in fixes in official datasets!). Government official editing directly would be in many cases more harmful than useful.
I understand why you say this (which sums up to "governments are bureaucrats, please get out of the way for us to do the actual job"), but the issue is that there are still people needed to go from government data to OSM. Ideally, governments would simply pay OSM people to do it on their own, but eh, we know this can never happen, and even if it did, greedy people might be tempted by that kind of money and would go i…
Vast majority of time is used up on handling useful but not fully correct data.
I am not aware of any datasets that are high quality, on a compatible license, including data of interest to OSM and existing for longer than a year - that would not be imported already.
There are more people interested in making imports than high quality datasets on a compatible licenses, this is not the bottleneck.
I wish Ordnance Survey in the UK would help out a little with the UK dataset - even with just say the buildings
OS is increasingly making available data under public open licences. I believe data under open government licence should be compatible with OSM, as it's pretty permissive. If you combine a few different datasets you can build a pretty good picture https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/product... The UPRN dataset gives you a point coordinate for each property. The Zoomstack map gives building level vect…
edit: found the answer (abeit an old thread) https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=66173