Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

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 contributions from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and hundreds or thousands of smaller companies all coming back in to a single global map that everyone can use. It's very worth it to do work that strengthens OSM, as it increases the number of companies that will use it, and possibly contribute back, rather than doing work the world at large won't benefit from.

P.S. As a disclaimer, I am co-founder of Geocode Earth (https://geocode.earth) a small business that does indeed profit from OSM (and other open) data. We also contribute back both through OSM contributions and by releasing our core software as the Pelias geocoder (https://pelias.io)

Could this be a good use case for cryptocurrency?

It's a good question to ask. Many here probably aren't old enough to remember the cautionary tale of CDDB/Gracenote [1].

Back when Compact Discs were still a thing. on Winamp, WMP, etc you wanted to display a list of tracks, covert art, the artist, etc. Volunteers contributed this data from their own discs (that could be identified). This was before MP3s and ID3 tagging.

So volunteers built the CDDB with this data. The entity that "owned" it silently put in a copyright assignment with any submissions and ultimately became a company called Gracenote, which still exists today. They also removed the free access to CDDB.

None of this matters today but at the time it was a huge loss and a betrayal.

So I personally think it's completely fine to contribute to something like OSM as long as there are guarantees in there that the open access to that data can't be lost. It doesn't bother me if the likes of Apple and Microsoft use that for commercial uses, particularly if in doing so they contribute data back to the project.

This is why Stackoverflow dumps [2] were done in the first place and why they're so important: as a guarantee against that data being taken away or put behind a paywall.

Beware the CDDBs of the world however.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB

[2]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/224873/all-stack-ex...

> as long as there are guarantees in there that the open access to that data can't be lost.

1) current dataset can be fully downloaded and is available under a copyleft license

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm

2) it would be relatively hard to hijack project https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Contributor_Term...

OSMF agrees that it may only use or sub-license Your Contents as part of a database and only under the terms of one or more of the following licences: ODbL 1.0 for the database and DbCL 1.0 for the individual contents of the database; CC-BY-SA 2.0; or such other free and open licence (for example, http://www.opendefinition.org/okd/) as may from time to time be chosen by a vote of the OSMF membership and approved by at least a 2/3 majority vote of active contributors.

No, but they can change the licence to indicate it cannot be used for displaying "data agregations" (like the one FB does), that way forcing those wanting to use the OSM data plus that of their quality asurance to either not using OSM data or to make their QA data public (hoping they will chose the latter) which would in deed benefit us all