[HN Gopher] Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap for...
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Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap for free?
Author : nathan_phoenix
Score : 193 points
Date : 2021-12-28 14:16 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ctrl.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ctrl.blog)
| hirako2000 wrote:
| no. I wish osm would adjust their licensing to prevent reuse of
| contributions to build non free (as in open) servicing.
| simonh wrote:
| Since companies including Apple and Microsoft contribute a lot
| of data and funding to OSM, what benefits do you imagine would
| result from preventing them using it?
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| It's the permissive vs. free software license debate. In
| practice there are people who won't be able to use the data for
| their use case if a non-permissive license is applied.
| nightpool wrote:
| > In practice there are people who won't be able to use the
| data for their use case if a non-permissive license is
| applied
|
| Well, of course. The whole _point_ of a non-permissive
| license is to.... not permit things. It 's frustrating to see
| people bring this out like some sort of gotcha. I use the
| AGPL because I think it's important that users have access to
| the source code the applications they interact with operate
| on. If people aren't okay with that, then they're completely
| welcome to not use my code.
|
| (I am somewhat sympathetic to people who think that the GPL's
| definition of "Combined Work" is too broad--I've personally
| never viewed the inclusion of dependencies in a dynamic
| programming language with strong module boundaries like Node,
| Ruby or Python as creating a "Combined Work"--and I'd happily
| license my works with a theoretical LAGPL or an Affero-like
| Mozilla Public License if either of those were available.
| Unfortunately, the AGPL remains the only game in town for
| networked software.)
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I'm not sure if you're aware, but the data on OSM is
| covered by their ODbL which is a "share-alike" license.
| From their FAQ[1]: What do you mean by
| Share-Alike? If you publicly use any adapted
| version of our database, or a partial extraction from it,
| or works (such as maps) produced from an adapted database,
| you must also offer that adapted database under the ODbL.
| In other words, 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. Share-Alike only applies if you
| distribute what you have done to outside people or
| organisations. You can do what you like at home, or in your
| school, organisation or company ... the following section
| does not apply to you.
|
| It's true that people can use their software and data for
| non-free services built on non-FOSS code, but people using
| the data publicly _do_ have to distribute modifications to
| the data-set under the same license
|
| [1]:
| https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Database_License
| nightpool wrote:
| Yes, I'm well aware. I think it maybe makes more sense to
| make this reply to one of the other comments I'm replying
| to.
| Brakenshire wrote:
| I find the distinction difficult to understand. The way I
| interpret the OSM license, the data is really not freely
| available to use in a commercial context except as a base
| layer. If you use the OSM data in combination with any other
| data sources you have to publish both the resulting dataset
| and any processing steps or algorithms used to produce the
| dataset. So that means you cannot combine OSM data with any
| dataset which cannot be released, and it also means any
| innovation you develop in processing the data cannot be
| protected.
|
| I can see why the license was chosen, clearly it's necessary
| to prevent Microsoft or Apple taking the data and closing it
| off for their use, but at the same time it seems to make most
| business models using the data unsustainable. It's a shame
| from a HN perspective, you'd hope open data would allow for
| the continual opportunity for the creation of startups to
| innovate on using the data, locking open competition in the
| same way that open software has done, but it doesn't seem to
| be working out that way. Most companies in the area seem to
| be creators and consumers of base layers, I don't see many
| doing anything with the geographical database.
|
| Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the terms of the license.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| It's more complex than that. OSM's licence isn't a direct
| parallel of one single software licence, but it has an
| LGPL-ish permissive aspect for making things from the data
| ("Produced Works").
|
| OSM data is used a lot for routing (pretty much all bike
| navigation apart from Google's uses OSM data) and
| increasingly for GIS-type analysis.
| chaz6 wrote:
| I am happy to contribute for free, but after what happened with
| Mapillary, I would like a clause that states that should OSM be
| sold, I would be entitled to a portion of the sale amount
| commensurate with my contributions, or the option to withhold my
| contributions from the sale.
| yosito wrote:
| 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?
| betwixthewires wrote:
| These companies contribute ~17% of worldwide road change
| updates, if that's not employing anyone to work on OSM then
| what exactly do you mean by "work on OSM?"
| simonh wrote:
| 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?
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Strictly speaking OSM does not employ anyone partly because
| it is not some legal entity.
|
| (Open Street Map Foundation has very limited employees and
| contractors, see https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Contract
| ors_and_employee... )
| burkaman wrote:
| We don't need to change that because it isn't true:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29714360
|
| The author is using very specific phrasing ("in the OSM
| community") that apparently excludes corporate employees that
| contribute to OSM.
| tapiok wrote:
| of course it is true OSM mappers provide free labor (also) to
| corporate giants. They have vested (economic) interest to not
| fork the OSM project exactly for this reason. Maybe they will
| do it one day though.
| delusional wrote:
| Corollary: Why are contributions to OpenStreetMap systematically
| undervalued?
|
| I think it's a much more interesting question WHY we are being
| asked to contribute to OSM for free. Why isn't it
| possible/feasible to gain compensation relative to the amount of
| value contributed? And what does that mean for our "free market"
| in general. If you can't compensate this kind of project, are
| they being repressed by the inherent incentive structures?
|
| I don't think that's a failure of the OSM project, but rather a
| failure of our economic system.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| 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. Everyone benefitted from this which
| was awesome.
| tomrod wrote:
| In today's AI/ML saturated landscape, your approach to data
| labeling to augment applications is much needed. Awesome to
| hear it went well!
| tverbeure wrote:
| The TIGER data was (is?) terrible in terms of exact
| coordinates, but the graph of the streets is usually accurate.
|
| Back in 2007 or so, I spent hundreds of hours aligning TIGER
| data to the satellite imagery in OSM, usually in cities I never
| had been before. If I remember correctly, I did most of Fresno.
| :-)
|
| I'm totally fine with my edits being used commercially too.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > Microsoft Bing uses OSM in several regions, and is slowly
| moving from it's traditional providers to OSM globally. They
| provide machine-learning (ML) datasets that they have computed
| from areal imagery. They employ nobody in the OSM community.
|
| Microsoft Bing made its aerial imagery available for OSM editing,
| this is often very very very useful for mapping (speaking from
| own experience as an OSM mapper).
|
| See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/maps/product/imagery-
| service...
|
| > The rights that you have under this agreement are limited
| solely to aerial imagery use in a non-commercial online editor
| application of OpenStreetMap maps (an "Application")
|
| see also extra info in
| https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bing_Maps#Terms.2C_Clari...
|
| It is an interesting case as cost of that is basically nothing to
| Microsoft, this action has a very clear benefits to them, has
| negative influence on their competition like Google, has
| basically no negative side effects to OSM community (unlike
| company hiring people) and provides service that would cost OSM
| community ridiculous amounts of money if we would need to buy it
| (it would be impossible for us to buy worldwide aerial imagery of
| such quality).
|
| It is weird to not mention it in that article.
| gnufx wrote:
| Not news to Mateusz, but Microsoft also provide some
| "streetside" imagery, and there are other imagery providers,
| like ESRI (lower resolution, but typically more up-to-date and
| better aligned where I've used it).
| londons_explore wrote:
| > costs basically nothing to Microsoft
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if this agreement was a big headache
| when Microsoft is licensing imagery from various satellite
| imagery providers.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| EDIT: I rephrased to
|
| > cost of that is basically nothing to Microsoft
|
| ---------------
|
| I am unaware about internal Microsoft proceedings, but it
| seems possible.
|
| Though I guess that given Microsoft scale and benefits from
| that it should be possible to describe it as "costs basically
| nothing to Microsoft"
|
| It is not low sum, I would be bankrupted either by lawyer
| consultations on this topic and by extra server traffic if I
| would be paying for that, but on Microsoft scale it is
| probably nothing.
| cbozeman wrote:
| Well we have SpaceX now... and Microsoft is a trillion dollar
| company.
|
| Launch some satellites.
| delusional wrote:
| The highest quality aerial photography of my country
| (Denmark) is taken from planes, not satellites.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| "Satellite" imagery on Google Maps is a misnomer, and
| when it launched there was a big disagreement on the name
| that got brought all the way to Larry and Sergey. At the
| end of the meeting one of them said "call it Bird Mode",
| but the devs ignored that and stuck with "satellite"
| because they though bird mode was silly.
|
| More details in this Twitter thread:
| https://twitter.com/btaylor/status/1099370126678253569
| hyperionplays wrote:
| Same for Australia. NearMap is mostly plane (and hot air
| balloon) images for the high quality stuff.
| astrange wrote:
| Bing actually has the highest quality aerial images of
| Australia in some places, licensed from Vexcel.
|
| Meanwhile nobody has a good 3D map of Brisbane - Apple
| has none, Google's is labeled (c) 2021 but is
| inexplicably actually from 2010 or so.
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| They owned Vexcel for some years: In
| 2006, Vexcel Imaging was acquired by Microsoft
| Corporation and contributed as a subsidiary to the
| success of Microsoft's Bing program by pushing the
| envelope of photogrammetric hardware and software
| technology with innovations that underpinned the Bing
| Maps web service and mapping platform.
|
| https://www.vexcel-imaging.com/company/
| onphonenow wrote:
| The article is very weird. If the author doesn't understand the
| value of the aerial imagery (global) they have obviously never
| tried to license this stuff globally.
|
| That alone should give Microsoft "platinum" status.
|
| Secondly, you need users to justify investments in these
| products. Microsoft brings users. Now businesses and others
| start paying attention, updating their details etc.
| 123pie123 wrote:
| I wish Ordnance Survey in the UK would help out a little with the
| UK dataset - even with just say the buildings
| g_p wrote:
| 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 vectors, I believe (if
| it isn't Zoomstack, it's one of the other free and open ones),
| and is pretty usable in qgis and other tools.
| 123pie123 wrote:
| thanks, would that make it ok for someone to import the
| information from OS to OSM?
|
| edit: found the answer (abeit an old thread)
| https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=66173
| juliansimioni wrote:
| 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)
| humanistbot wrote:
| Right! Remember when Google made their Maps API far more
| restrictive and it broke a whole bunch of cool applications
| that were built on top of it? That can't happen with OSM.
| alufers wrote:
| OSM is so good that even the fire fighters use it in Poland for
| navigation and finding fire hydrants. The funny thing is that
| if you modify or add a fire hydrant a guy from the emergency
| services asks to send a picture of it before he approves the
| change.
| purple_turtle wrote:
| To clarify: they maintain(ed) own reviewed replica of OSM
| data and asked about suspicious edits.
|
| Any edits in OSM go live immediately without review.
| Tostino wrote:
| I feel like this is where there could be some improvements.
| It would be quite nice to allow a review process to be
| setup for some types of edits. Plenty of examples in the
| market to get inspiration from.
| purple_turtle wrote:
| In many areas there is zero or just one local mapper.
|
| And vandalism and malicious editing remains rare.
|
| That would be enormous effort for minimal benefit.
| spockz wrote:
| How does that work? Does OSM verify who emergency services
| employees are? Or is the item owned by an account of an
| employee of the emergency services?
|
| It seems like this data should be coming directly from some
| government database.
| purple_turtle wrote:
| To clarify: they maintain(ed) own reviewed replica of OSM
| data and asked about suspicious edits.
|
| Any edits in OSM go live immediately without review.
|
| And Poland has no government database of hydrants or AED.
|
| In fact Polish community is right now working on making
| decent AED database - with
| https://aed.openstreetmap.org.pl/ created recently that
| shows already collected data
| juliansimioni wrote:
| That's amazing! I know that lots of local and regional
| governments are trending towards using OSM as their source of
| truth for data about their area, but hadn't heard that
| particular story. Love it!
| lostlogin wrote:
| How is this not done by the installer? Seems like a problem
| that didn't need crowd sourcing.
| purple_turtle wrote:
| That would make sense but at least some companies that
| maintain hydrants are also using OSM data.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Yes, would it be really better to be in situation where
| standard dataset is proprietary and controlled by Google?
| lukeqsee wrote:
| I second Julian here, as the founder of another company (in
| profile) that profits heavily from OSM's data set.
|
| It's amazing how good OSM is today, and the rate at which it's
| expanding and improving means it will only get much better over
| time.
| durkie wrote:
| Thanks for Stadia maps! Happy paying customer here and it
| substantially lowered my map hosting bill compared to mapbox.
| lukeqsee wrote:
| You're welcome! Reach out if you ever need anything. :-)
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| Yep I worked with a popular scooter company in Taiwan to help
| build software to implement Taiwan's left hand turn rules into
| GPS. It was just a matter of labeling the correct
| intersections. They wanted to eventually share the changes
| upstream with OSM. Very fun project that I miss very much.
|
| Sadly I don't think the map editing SQLite cli/gui tool made it
| out to OSS, even though that was a request I had.
| BoumTAC wrote:
| Does anyone know what happened to the Amazon team ? I was
| following their edits here: https://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-
| changesets?comment=amap
|
| They were one of the main contributors to OSM and now they nearly
| stop contributing to OSM (they are still contributing but maybe
| 10 times less than before)
| [deleted]
| kranke155 wrote:
| Seems like a great use case for web3 and DAOs later on when they
| become a bit less anarchic. You could tokenise contributions to
| OpenStreetMap.
| timeon wrote:
| If someone does not want to contribute for free it is his
| decision. But many people like volunteering. OSM has already
| massive contribution from hobby users (and from corporations as
| well). What will "web3" solve here? Not everything needs to be
| monetized.
| fdr wrote:
| I recently picked up OSM mapping. The tools are way better than
| ten years ago when I had a look: I like both the web editor and
| the "Go Map!!" iOS application. My motivation is mostly so that I
| can have accurate results when visiting or re-visiting a place.
| In a few months (or weeks), the sheer number of OSM consumers
| allow you to receive the benefit of your own changes. Write once,
| read everywhere.
|
| I don't advance this is necessarily sufficient or OSM is getting
| a great deal for its value, but it's what got me involved after a
| long period watching from the sidelines: it was a wise suggestion
| from an AllTrails staff member on a support ticket.
| an_alien_heat wrote:
| globular-toast wrote:
| > I'm not gonna lie, I kind of like that idea. In the OSM world
| you just have to have faith that your edits are helping people.
| There is basically no feedback loop.
|
| Do people really need this? I use OSM whenever I go on a walk
| anywhere in the world and I often think about the local mappers
| who maintain the data. I can say with almost complete certainty
| that someone, somewhere has appreciated my own OSM contributions
| at some point. That's enough for me.
| EGreg wrote:
| Could this be a good use case for cryptocurrency?
| justapassenger wrote:
| Solution still looking for problems to solve?
| lawtalkinghuman wrote:
| No.
| EGreg wrote:
| How are you so sure? Please elaborate
| lawtalkinghuman wrote:
| OSM is making a volunteer-run open source GIS dataset, not
| an unregulated speculative securities offering.
| EGreg wrote:
| who is talking about securities? I'm talking about
| micropayments
| [deleted]
| matkoniecz wrote:
| For which part?
|
| Main complaint in article is that major companies should employ
| people from OSM community. But inability to transfer money is
| not something blocking Microsoft or FB here.
| EGreg wrote:
| The part where people contribute anonymously and receive
| compensation
| jmnicolas wrote:
| To me this article reads like "I want to get a job paid by the
| big players". The fact is, it's not a one way street, they're
| contributing back with data. We all benefit from this.
|
| While I dislike what these companies stand for (I use a Linux
| desktop and a degoogled phone) in this case I don't think they're
| in the wrong.
| cletus wrote:
| 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...
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| In a way it is how Google operates: One can send in details
| about shops and corrections for the maps, but Google is the
| sole owner of the resulting map.
|
| With OSM however I have the same rights to the combined data as
| any other entity.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > 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.
| danShumway wrote:
| > as long as there are guarantees in there that the open access
| to that data can't be lost
|
| This is the key point. The problem isn't mutual benefit, the
| problem is when communities can be seized by private entities
| or have the rug pulled out from under them, effectively
| stealing a community and shutting it down for their own gain.
| That's the difference between OSM and GoodReads. If you're
| going to donate time, make sure you donate time to commons, not
| to companies.
|
| That being said, OSM does have a lot of guarantees about its
| data in place, and even better has license requirements that
| force companies who extend that data to contribute back. It's
| good that OSM is seeing more usage across the industry.
| phh wrote:
| 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 OSM is an infrastructure, is for
| governments to actually contribute to it.
| skadge wrote:
| Some governments already do, and sometimes at a massive scale.
| See for instance the mass import of French cadastre in OSM in
| 2008. We are talking about millions of georeferenced entities.
| Proven wrote:
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > 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.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > The best way to contribute is to openly license government
| datasets
|
| 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.
| phh wrote:
| 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 into the OSM community just for that.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Once data is high quality actual import is quite easy to
| do.
|
| 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.
| gnufx wrote:
| For clarity, I assume "import" isn't meant to mean
| everything in the dataset is shortly in OSM, but it's
| available to aid with mapping (e.g. free UK Ordnance
| Survey data).
| kelnos wrote:
| This sounds like another tired variation on the "open source is
| dead" article that popped up here a few weeks ago.
|
| People contribute to things for free for a variety of reasons.
| I've made only a couple contributions to OSM, but I'm happy to do
| so. The world needs freely available mapping data. Sure, the
| companies that benefit from it the most may not contribute
| financially or with manpower (just like with most open source),
| but that doesn't change the usefulness of OSM.
|
| I'd much rather we have something like OSM than have all this
| data locked up behind paywalls and contracts. Who does and
| doesn't support the work is irrelevant to me.
| nraynaud wrote:
| I have tried providing a correction to OSM, they never got
| moderated or integrated. But there is a local club because they
| used the email address I provided to invite me.
|
| I don't think I want to spend time doing it again.
| purple_turtle wrote:
| Edits on OpenStreetMap are not moderated, any edit goes live
| immediately.
|
| Do you remember your account name?
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| If all open source software had new license terms tomorrow that
| said "no commercial use unless you pay me a license fee", they'd
| just stop using open source. Using it is a business calculation.
| If you don't get support and you have to pay for it, you might as
| well pay for proprietary software that you can get support from.
|
| And maybe that's fine! Maybe we shouldn't let companies use the
| software _at all_. But that would have ecosystem-shaking results
| as the costs are passed down to consumers and fewer engineers are
| employed. At this point, the whole world is dependent on OSS.
|
| Open Source does not exist for people to get paid. If it did,
| it'd be the worst software gig in the world, by pay anyway :) To
| ask for money just because somebody else is getting money and
| you're not is simply envy and greed. Either ask for the money up
| front before you release the thing, or don't worry about what
| other people are getting paid.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| The (strict) philosophy of open source isn't to take money from
| its adopters, or to prevent them to monetise, it is to spread
| the openness to serve humanity by having the intelligence
| reused and built upon rather than energy wasted on replicating
| and competing.
|
| Competition is a waste, contrary to the misinformation we have
| been subjected to, it only serves a minority at the expense of
| everyone else. Collaboration offers far greater efficiencies,
| the essence and success of open source lies in the openness and
| contagion of openness to share the yield of commutative
| expenses.
|
| I think the valid discontent you express is with regards to the
| open source flag being used to promote goodwill while in
| reality building a business model on it with closeness to
| protect monetisation. that I agree has been a plague and a very
| disingenuous approach to doing business, at the end hurting
| opensource, at least tarnishing the goodness reputation open
| source has built for decades.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > Competition is a waste
|
| I partially agree with this claim, but - FOSS software does
| not prevent competition, it just takes the intellectual
| property and copyrights aspect from it. You compete in
| conditions of access to your competitor's data as well as
| yours. And there is intense competition in FOSS! It doesn't
| devolve into everybody working on the same thing. But the
| point is it is always possible to derive from one of the
| "branches" of competition and do your own thing.
|
| (Case in point: Desktop environments which based themselves
| on GNOME 2 because they didn't like where GNOME 3 was headed
| design-wise.)
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| I guess we should be more specific: in OSS, there is
| _licensing competition_ in that there are multiple
| licenses. Competition between different OSS platforms is
| _platform competition_ , and competition between
| applications on a platform is _ecosystem competition_.
|
| When you think about it, there are many levels of
| competition, and very little code re-use. Only a few shared
| libraries or APIs/ABIs are actually reused by more than a
| handful of apps.
| cherrycherry98 wrote:
| My understanding of the philosophy of open source is
| different. I believe it was always more fundamentally about
| freedom and specifically encouraging a marketplace of ideas.
|
| Going back to the early days with Stallman and the GPL it was
| about making software more transparent and empowering users.
| You can see how something is implemented, modify how it works
| for your own needs, etc, just like if you were to buy a
| physical machine like a car.
|
| Competition is not a waste, it is the means by which free
| actors improve society. In theory there if there's one
| provider of everything, there is less waste, and that may be
| true for certain periods of time but not in general. Power
| structures ossify, become bloated, corrupt, and inefficient.
| If you have a monopoly, even if it's the most benevolent,
| open one in the world, the incentives to improve are
| diminished. The most powerful incentive to improvement is the
| threat of those you depend on for money, power, or status,
| freely choosing against you, which requires competition. You
| need people that are able to look at the status quo and
| decide that they can do it better, creating the next
| generation of whatever it may be.
|
| The OSS community has lots of competition and is better for
| it. Linux competes with the BSDs and private OSs. There's
| tons of distros building off each other trying new ideas.
| Forking is expected. It doesn't always lead to the next great
| project but it moves the needle.
| ordiel wrote:
| 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
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| I have contributed a few details to OSM, as well as to Google
| Maps. Not for any high-flying moral reasons, but because I use
| them and found the small errors irritating.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Yes we should definitely kill off the only mapping solution
| accessible to bootstrapping startups because big players are
| semi-freeloading.
| tapiok wrote:
| there are other options. For example https://n8n.io/blog/fair-
| code-for-sustainable-open-source-al...
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| This article is just factually wrong.
|
| It alleges repeatedly that Facebook, Apple, Microsoft etc "employ
| nobody in the OSM community". They do. Microsoft even employed
| the founder of OSM, Steve Coast, for a while.
|
| If your criterion is 'involved in OSM prior to current
| employment', I could name a bunch of people currently working for
| Facebook, Amazon, Snap etc of whom that's true. (One such person
| even stood for election to the OSM Foundation board this month.)
|
| But, as others have pointed out, I'd hope we're more welcoming
| than that. As far as I'm concerned, if you're editing OSM you're
| part of the community.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| My experience with the more extreme OSM folks is that as soon
| as you are working for a large company, you are no longer a
| member of the community. More generally, there is nothing the
| big companies could do to make them happy, short of divesting
| completely from OSM so that they can get their hobby project
| from 2008 back.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I've never talked to anyone like this, not sure where you get
| it from.
|
| You get people that are suspicious and cautious about big
| corp sponsorship of OSM, and rightly so, EEE was and still is
| a thing. But in OSM, contributors are contributors, plain and
| simple.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| I get it from personal experience having once worked on OSM
| for a big company. Next time you're at an OSM conference,
| strike up a conversation with anyone from a big tech
| company and ask about folks like this, I'm sure they'll
| have plenty of stories. Better yet, go to their talk and
| watch the Q&A session get derailed by some guy who's mad
| about the way a bike path was tagged.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| I'm sure you can find any given opinion in a community of 2m
| registered users with a public mailing list, especially any
| community which includes a bunch of 17-year old Linux
| enthusiasts, but it's not remotely representative of the OSM
| community nor a particularly useful subset to identify.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| I agree they are not representative of the community, but
| they are a quite vocal minority, to whom anyone working on
| OSM in a corporate context is well-acquainted.
|
| I offer my observations as a warning to take any anti-
| corporate sentiment from self-proclaimed OSM community
| representatives with a grain of salt.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| I'd fully agree with the latter. Sometimes (often) a
| gobshite on a mailing list is just a gobshite on a
| mailing list. (He says, looking anxiously at his own 2000
| list postings over 17 years.)
|
| The lists are sometimes attributed a significance they
| don't really have any more - they have a few hundred
| subscribers max in a massive project. Most of the OSM US
| community discussion happens on Slack, in Germany it's a
| webforum, some countries use Telegram and so on.
| rStar wrote:
| bee_rider wrote:
| Yeah, that struck me as a bit of an odd repeated phrase. I
| think they mean that these companies don't have anyone employed
| specifically to contribute to the project. But that's only one
| of many ways a company might contribute to a project...
| gnufx wrote:
| Right, and I'm rather concerned that this be taken as
| representative of the OSM UK community.
|
| Also, it seems pretty easy to add something in the Organic Maps
| app (ne maps.me), for instance, not that I use that for
| mapping.
| thrwn_frthr_awy wrote:
| Apple had full time OSM mappers as well as sponsored weekly
| mapping meetups where employees could volunteer to help with
| mapping. I'm not sure if they still do this. The OSM and
| cartographers I worked with at Apple were all very passionate
| about helping map remote parts of the world and the benefits
| mapping brings during disasters.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| When I was on Apple Maps in 2018-19 they still did this! I'm
| pretty confident they still do.
| BoumTAC wrote:
| They still have a team, you can follow their edits here:
| https://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-changesets?comment=adt
| techsupporter wrote:
| I sent this article to a friend of mine who works for Microsoft
| and they came back with an interesting anecdote: several groups
| inside Microsoft, including theirs, have recurring "hack for
| good" gatherings, especially during the pandemic when regular
| get-togethers aren't happening. One of the things they do for
| this is to log into a community team (I'm not sure of the exact
| term, I don't contribute to OSM) and spend a couple of hours
| tagging landmarks and streets and edges of farms and various
| other geographic features while BSing together as a team.
|
| Sounds kind of relaxing to me, and a way to contribute a bulk
| of hours to OSM that I hadn't thought of.
| hirsin wrote:
| Can confirm, this is popular on my team. Additionally, this
| should also direct actual dollars to OSM - volunteering for
| an organization is matched in cash by Microsoft, to the tune
| of 20-something an hour.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| > volunteering for an organization is matched in cash by
| Microsoft, to the tune of 20-something an hour.
|
| I've never heard of a policy like this before, but I like
| it a lot (admittedly I've been mostly in academia). Is this
| unique to Microsoft or more common?
| hirsin wrote:
| Google does this at 10/hour as well. Unsure of others.
| Both Google and Microsoft match cash donations too up to
| 15k/year - it's a wonderful perk to have after you've
| basically covered all your living expenses and savings
| etc. I can eg fund a minor scholarship at half cost, or
| direct serious money to a cause I care about.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| Yeah, I've heard of matching monetary charitable
| donations before but this is the first time I've heard of
| matching volunteer time with money.
|
| Thanks!
| ydlr wrote:
| > They employ nobody in the OSM community.
|
| I imagine many of the employees that do the work mentioned in the
| article would consider themselves part of the OSM community.
| petee wrote:
| I suspect they are suggesting a difference between working to
| contribute as part of the community, versus being solely to
| further their company's product.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| I was hoping they'd include a comment describing what they mean
| when they talk about employing someone in the OSM community
| (and how they'd know).
| burkaman wrote:
| Here's one example of a person employed by Apple to work on
| OSM: https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/andrewwiseman
|
| Facebook and Microsoft are also "Gold Corporate Members" of OSM
| which costs EUR10,000 / year, and they are "Corporate Partners"
| of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, which does employ
| people to directly work on OSM: https://www.hotosm.org/.
|
| Also apparently "nearly 17% of the global road network was last
| edited by a corporate data-team member"
| (https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/), and lots of
| people must be employed by corporations to make that happen,
| even if it's mostly automated edits.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Seems like circular reasoning:
|
| Being a part of the OSM community means they aren't employed by
| OSM as employees. If they employ the person, they're no longer
| a community member but an employee.
|
| I don't actually see the issue.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > they aren't employed by OSM
|
| Note that OSM does not employ anyone (Open Street Map
| Foundation has very limited employees and contractors, see ht
| tps://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Contractors_and_employee...
| )
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > The only one I can recommend as being easy to use is
| StreetComplete for Android
|
| This is nice to hear as major contributor to that software (if
| you use that app and something is unclear then it is likely a bug
| that should be reported to
| https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues )
| mwattsun wrote:
| 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 store on a map I helped
| create. In fact, even that improves the amount of information I
| have about a place.
|
| My answer to the title question is a strong "yes" in this case
| and I consider it akin to a grocery store putting up signs saying
| "Please help us keep costs down and pass the savings along to you
| by returning your cart to the cart stand." Giant mega corp
| Walmart does this if memory serves.
|
| I like that humanity has built such an amazing thing as maps and
| like it when people return their shopping carts.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| > I've enjoyed Google Maps for many years and never paid for
| it.
|
| You did pay for Google Maps indirectly as you were and still
| are a product Google sells to advertisers.
| seaman1921 wrote:
| there is nothing like 'paying indirectly'.
|
| did it overall cost them any money ? no
|
| did it overall cost them any physical effort ? no
|
| did google force them to use the service ? no
|
| Does it really sting so much to admit Google Maps is a free
| to use service?
| juanbyrge wrote:
| I feel like I have derived so much value from Google Maps,
| especially turn by turn navigation, than I don't even
| consider the advertisement aspects. I would happily pay a
| monthly fee to use it.
|
| Before it you had to use paper maps or use those very
| expensive and crappy Garmin devices.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| I remember back when we were at an intermediate stage of
| maps when you could type an address into Mapquest and then
| print out the directions to it and take that stack of paper
| with you.
|
| Now days you can drop into the middle of almost anywhere on
| the globe and get mostly accurate on-the-ground directions
| regardless of if you walk, take public transport or drive.
| Made navigating Tokyo so much easier!
| mwattsun wrote:
| It used to be a joke that married couples travelling would
| fight over maps. The man was always driving and the wife
| was always reading the large unwieldy paper map. The man
| would get mad about a woman's trouble reading the map. The
| wife would retort "What happened to your vaunted sense of
| direction? Why are you such a cheap skate to wait until we
| are lost before buying a map at a service station?" Good
| times.
| mping wrote:
| Google doesn't need you to pay, they only need you to do your
| thing using Android, Chrome, Google Analytics, Google Search,
| Google Maps, etc. They will monetize on your usage. I'm OK
| with the concept, but the implementation ethics can be, to
| put it gently, debatable - most of the time people are not
| aware of the privacy implications.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| 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.
| windthrown wrote:
| No, in fact copying from Google Maps is a violation of their
| terms of service:
|
| https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/FAQ#Why_don.27t_you_just.
| ..
| astrange wrote:
| The answers saying "no" are not necessarily correct, but the
| actual answer depends on which country you live in.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| If you contribute to Google Maps then you fix private Google
| database.
| seaman1921 wrote:
| this is not true, you fix it for everyone using Google maps
| (which is basically everyone)
| purple_turtle wrote:
| Where I can download Google map data dataset for my own
| processing?
|
| Yes, Google makes apps usable by general public but their
| database is proprietary - including what people
| contribute for free.
| thepete2 wrote:
| No and that is IMO the point of using OSM in the first place.
| The data is public and free for everyone and if you
| contribute there's the possibility of other services adopting
| your change. I know that mapbox integrates osm data, Google
| and Apple might too.
| VictorPath wrote:
| OpenStreetMap has an "on the ground rule" where a street, a
| street name, a city, a city name etc. are determined by who
| currently has control on the ground. So the Malvinas are the
| Falkland Islands, Derry is Londonderry etc.
|
| The sole exception to this is the Crimea, which the OSM board
| ruled is exempt from this rule, as they favor the Ukrainian
| government over the Russian government.
| Symbiote wrote:
| "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic
| tangents."
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Also, looking at your comment history: "Please don't use Hacker
| News for political or ideological battle. It tramples
| curiosity."
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| I went on an OSM editing binge a few years ago to make Pokemon
| Go's in-game map better. Now that I've done that, I haven't had
| much reason to edit it more.
| efsavage wrote:
| > They employ nobody in the OSM community.
|
| If they are contributing data, they are _part of_ the OSM
| community.
| nurgasemetey wrote:
| While working with municipalities, they provided us with
| shapefile of bicycle routes and add to our systems. It would have
| been better if they just added bicycle routes to OSM but I think
| they don't want to take responsibility of maintaining it.
| rStar wrote:
| zaik wrote:
| I contribute to OSM because I want to make alternatives to Google
| Maps like OsmAnd or Organicmaps more useful. That big players
| also use open data does not invalidate my reasons to contribute.
| jefftk wrote:
| In fact, that big players also use it supports your reasons:
| everyone contributing back data helps make OSM more useful.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| I use OSM data for free too, and don't employ anyone from OSM.
|
| Why wouldn't I fix the data around where I live, if I can, and if
| it helps me, and everyone else trying to navigate here? I fix
| stuff here, someone else fixes stuff somewhere else, there are
| also gamified apps (atleast one), where you can get "badges" to
| input basic data to OSM, and everyone profits.
| cheeaun wrote:
| I'm curious to know if the companies that use OSM actually
| contribute back? Like fixing all the wrong/malicious data.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Microsoft Bing made its aerial imagery available for OSM
| editing, this is often very very very useful for mapping.
|
| See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/maps/product/imagery-
| service...
|
| > The rights that you have under this agreement are limited
| solely to aerial imagery use in a non-commercial online editor
| application of OpenStreetMap maps (an "Application")
|
| see also extra info in
| https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bing_Maps#Terms.2C_Clari...
| burkaman wrote:
| Yes: https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/
|
| > nearly 17% of the global road network was last edited by a
| corporate data-team member.
| tapiok wrote:
| ...and their share of edits is growing. Maybe one day OSM
| mappers will wake up and realize they provide free labor to
| corporate giants that sucks economic value from community.
| Hopefully it will be not too late.
| ciphol wrote:
| Corporations, whether giant or not, create products which
| people chose to purchase because they are useful. That's
| creating value, not sucking value.
|
| Sometimes a corporation can "suck value" by using
| anticompetitive behavior to prevent competitors from
| offering better/cheaper products to consumers. But in this
| case, Google is the big corporation, and contributions to
| OSM benefit smaller competitors at the expense of Google,
| creating more options and more value for consumers overall.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| As a user of OSM (and having contributed in the past but
| that's not relevant to my point) it looks like, to me, that
| if their share of edits is growing that _they_ are
| providing free labor _to me_ and people like me, no?
| burkaman wrote:
| Can you expand on how contributions suck economic value
| from the community? What community, and what value is being
| lost?
| mikhailt wrote:
| Yes, it is mentioned many times in the article itself; several
| paragraphs in fact.
|
| Here is a few:
|
| > Apple uses OSM data in parts of the world where their
| commercial partners don't provide data. They are reasonably
| good at fixing and contributing data to OSM in those regions.
| They employ nobody in the OSM community.
|
| > Microsoft Bing uses OSM in several regions, and is slowly
| moving from it's traditional providers to OSM globally. They
| provide machine-learning (ML) datasets that they have computed
| from areal imagery. They employ nobody in the OSM community.
| severak_cz wrote:
| Klokantech uses OSM data as a base data for their Maptiler
| platform.
|
| They maintains and contributed to some open source tool and
| they are hosting (for free) some open source maps.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| The post claims both that some companies contribute to OSM and
| that they do not employ anyone from the OSM community.
|
| There is some level of gatekeeping here, as the blog implies is
| that that employees at those companies are not part of the OSM
| community although they contribute to OSM.
|
| With this attitude ("no true OSM contributor unless I approve
| of"), it is hard to grow the community by welcoming new people.
| gumby wrote:
| > _They employ nobody in the OSM community._
|
| Malone keeps saying this but I don't think it means what he says
| it is.
|
| Those large entities employ _lots_ of people who add to OSM. Not
| only do they add content but by his own description they do QC
| and add other new features and support.
|
| Their contributions are no different (except in magnitude) than a
| single, tiny contribution I might make, yet presumably that would
| make me "part of the community" but not them?
| npteljes wrote:
| Yes you absolutely should. But, should you expect to make a
| living out of it? No.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| Google Maps is built on uncompensated user submissions, much of
| it involuntary (data from navigation, live and historical
| location, etc).
|
| We aren't their customers, we're the employees. That's why data
| ownership is such a verboten topic, it breaks their entire model.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Should you contribute to yourself for free?
| nradov wrote:
| My friends and I use a lot of Garmin fitness trackers and bike
| computers for endurance sports training. Those devices use maps
| derived from OSM. So when I contribute data to OSM for free I
| (eventually) see a direct benefit with better navigation on my
| devices.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| > It may be mainly made by individuals in there spare time, but
| the big tech companies are making millions of it.
|
| Dude please proof read. I walk into an article making a statement
| and the very second sentence has errors like this, you're losing
| credibility.
|
| > They are reasonably good at fixing and contributing data to OSM
| in those regions. They employ nobody in the OSM community.
|
| Except whoever contributes data to OSM in those regions? The same
| for every example in the list. Amazon is literally mapping towns
| for all of us and giving it away for free. What's the criteria
| for "in the OSM community" if not "contributes to OSM"? What's
| the point of FOSS if not this?
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > Dude please proof read. I walk into an article making a
| statement and the very second sentence has errors like this,
| you're losing credibility.
|
| Your first sentence has punctuation errors, and your second
| sentence it littered with grammatical errors...
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Deliberate, nuance. To get my point across articulated with
| my sentiment and attitude about what I'm saying. A similar
| approach to the cultural context included in colloquial
| dialects. A far cry away from "there" instead of "their" and
| "of" instead of "off."
| Rygian wrote:
| The main difference is that, with OSM, a third party can make
| direct commercial profit from my edits, but _so can anyone else
| including me_.
| thepete2 wrote:
| Your edit to google maps is a competitive advantage. Your edit
| to OSM is a public utility.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Google's competitive advantage?
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Yes, exactly. If someone improves Google Maps then such
| contribution is under control and owned by Google.
|
| If someone improves OSM then such contribution can be used
| by anyone - from hobby map maker, through artists, maker of
| open source navigation to evil corporations.
| bluGill wrote:
| I contribute so that friends can find my house. I hope everyone
| reads OSM data and updates their maps. Too many people put my
| address in GPS and end up several miles away.
| maceurt wrote:
| I am against any large scale collection of data that can be used
| to take away an individual's privacy or to assist a
| government/business/person's ability to track someone's location
| or residence. Its one thing to not be able to do anything about a
| private business collecting this information on their own
| volition, but its another to actually aid in its collection
| yourself. The more you accept and buy into this reality the
| faster it will accelerate out of control with opposition being
| not just those who stand to gain from its existence, but from
| useful idiots who don't understand sunk cost fallacy. The biggest
| hindrance in the long term happiness of the human species is the
| inability to reverse change. Even while we can admit a certain
| change is bad, we can never mitigate further change let alone put
| the cat back in the bag.
| throw8932894 wrote:
| Privacy ship has sailed long time ago. Try to remove license
| plates from your car. Or refuse to share information about your
| health!
|
| Now it is about gate keeping. Young people and startups, need
| the same ability as govs and established players. Until
| recently you could not even embed maps on your website (too
| expensive). Free data are levelling the playing field.
|
| And if anything OpenStreetMap helps me not to share my
| location. I can store map of entire continent offline on my
| phone, and do not have to ask remote servers for navigation!
| maceurt wrote:
| If we created a change we can un-create it. People who just
| accept that we are powerless to our past are the architects
| of our future hell.
|
| > I can store map of entire continent offline on my phone,
| and do not have to ask remote servers for navigation!
|
| The fact that you think anybody would need to have that is
| ridiculous. And also I can store an entire map of pretty much
| any place I need to go to and it doesn't require a phone....
| Furthermore, maps are only necessary in over bloated cities
| not designed with facilitating humans as the main objective.
| Just because that is where most people live nonetheless does
| not make it any more right.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I need to store the map of the entire US locally on my
| phone, because often, where I want to go has no service
| because where I go is very, very rural. If I were to do
| this with paper maps it would cost me hundreds of dollars.
| As a bonus, I can overlay the map with USGS GIS data and
| see all sorts of information about where I'm going, again,
| stored locally on my phone. I can tell you right now in
| about 30 seconds what federal or state agency manages any
| GPS coordinate and how to get there in a car, and if I need
| information like that, which I do, I can get it in the
| middle of the grand canyon a hundred miles from the nearest
| cell tower.
|
| People _do_ need it. You 're dismissing very, very powerful
| tools just to complain that your city isn't walkable,
| forgetting that some of us don't live anywhere remotely
| resembling a city at all. There's a whole world out here
| man.
| up6w6 wrote:
| Can someone give details about what is the best way to
| contribute? Is there some easy way like just installing an app in
| my phone and receive popup notifications to answer some quick
| questions when I'm in a queue of a random local shop?
| Rygian wrote:
| Yup, you can install Streetcomplete which does exactly that.
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| If you're on Android:
| https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/StreetComplete
| mngnt wrote:
| Check out StreetComplete. It's basically a map with question
| icons that help improve osm. It's even a bit gamified, you get
| achievements for a volume of replies :) Importantly, you can
| configure which types of question do you get, so you won't get
| bored by replying the same stuff again.
|
| More specialized, but perhaps more important for certain people
| is wheelmap.org. It catalogues amenities and their wheelchair
| accessibility. It has similar model for contribution as
| StreetComplete, you answer question about stairs, door widths
| and toilet accessibility.
|
| Have fun mapping :)
|
| Edit: corrected autocorrect.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Stranger on the street asks for directions:
|
| I'm sorry, I can't provide directions. I make $80/hour. Spending
| a minute giving you directions costs me more than $1 per minute,
| so please give me a $1.33 and then I'll tell you where to go.
| epaulson wrote:
| I've always thought OSM's data license should be more BSD-ish
| than the current LGPLish license. If you were trying to privately
| build and edit data from OSM, there'd be a pretty strong
| incentive to get most of your updates and corrections upstreamed
| back into OSM, (especially for things that are broadly of
| interest to the rest of the community) because eventually someone
| will also create those updates in the upstream OSM, and then
| you'll have to deal with how to merge your changes with the OSM
| changes.
|
| I think OSM would benefit more with more people building on the
| dataset, because even if a smaller percentage actually
| contributed back, they'd make up for it with a larger overall set
| of people building on the dataset. And I think they'd get a
| larger set of people building on the dataset with a more
| permissive license.
|
| (The obvious counterpoint is OSM is doing just fine with its
| current license)
| purple_turtle wrote:
| Given how BSD was used to create proprietary MacOS and
| PlayStation operating systems with basically nothing
| contributed back - I am not convinced.
| tomarr wrote:
| I don't think that's obvious, e.g. an Apple or Facebook could
| take OSM and fork it privately and invest all their efforts
| into that, without releasing upstream for competitive
| advantage.
| sovietmudkipz wrote:
| I struggle with contributing to open source but in a different
| context. In my opinion, the video games industry is information
| sparse on high quality software engineering practices, for
| whatever reason (NDAs, language/culture, etc). I am already
| authoring content that basically imports DevOps practices and
| experiences I have from my day job into a video games context. I
| believe practitioners have an edge over non-practitioners. Yet I
| hesitate to release it.
|
| 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?
| indigochill wrote:
| Arguably being more permissive could lead to more recognition.
| Lovecraft's mythos probably wouldn't have taken off the way it
| did had he been the only one writing it, but he was very
| permissive about letting others write their own stories in it
| (although I'm still unclear as to how he kept his name so
| closely associated with it when there were plenty of other
| writers riffing on it).
|
| In the tech context, if something you make gets a lot of uptake
| because a lot of people find it useful, then the spread of the
| useful thing could mean more recognition for you. But taking
| hold of that recognition will still require extra effort, like
| going to conferences to talk about the thing so people can put
| a face to the name.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| I figure I will be forgotten entirely within a generation or
| three, but maybe my minor contributions to open source software
| will help folks now and in the future solve problems. That
| coupled with the fact that I am standing on the shoulders of
| giants (whose names I mostly don't know) makes the choice to
| release my code freely easy.
|
| As a bonus, the more eyes there are on my code the more likely
| it is that I get good feedback, feedback I use to improve my
| skills.
| davidjytang wrote:
| I'm not a open source contributor in a major way. Just wanted
| to chime in.
|
| No doubt at least part of your know-how, however small, was
| built upon others' experiences (also hard to give credit for
| everything). If you do release your content, this is just
| giving back to the community.
|
| Also to play with your ego side, let's say some other person
| beats you to releasing the content that you wanted to release.
| And that person markets well and takes a lot of credit that you
| wanted. Would your ego push you to publish sooner?
| npteljes wrote:
| I think it's important to realize this struggle. You can take a
| myriad of approaches to life, to what and how you contribute to
| other people's lives. I think that ultimately you'll be taken
| advantage of a million times, because you can't really affect
| how other people act, but that shouldn't keep you from acting,
| if that serves you expressing yourself. So what you should be
| concerned about is how much it's actually hurting you or
| keeping you from realizing yourself.
|
| To make this a bit more tangible, you could examine this
| stuggle from different viewpoints.
|
| For example, does it hurt you that some people benefit a lot
| from your work, if you otherwise lead a comfortable life?
|
| Or, would your idea/knowledge be popular if you kept it "closed
| source"? Maybe it's popular now and many people benefit, and if
| those were paying users, boy, would you be rich. But the
| alternative could be that the fantastic knowledge of yours
| wouldn't get traction in the first place, leaving you with a
| worse outcome, but of course you're not taken advantage of
| either.
|
| I think what you should examine is what would make you feel
| like it's worth it to release the knowledge. Does applause
| sound nice? You could look into presentation. Do you like
| digital feedback like HN karma or youtube subscriber count?
| Look into content creation. I think that if you're honest with
| yourself about what would make you happy, then that should show
| the way.
| nz wrote:
| I have written some (obscure) open-source software and have
| contributed to open-source code-bases. I can say that if you
| are doing it for some kind of recognition, then you are doing
| it for the wrong reason. I _do_ think that you (and many
| others) would be worthy of recognition and appreciation, but
| most people are far too busy optimizing their careers and
| chasing the dollar to actually invest the time and effort
| needed to share some of the spotlight with you. Also, so much
| of our (humanity's) software stack is open source that we would
| need to share the spotlight with hundreds of people out there.
|
| Most people write open-source for material reasons -- it lets
| them bring some of their own code into a new workplace, with
| minimal employer resistance. Also, many people will try to
| open-source the tooling they built at work so that they can
| then take that tooling with them to a new employer (avoiding
| the duplication of effort and potential legal issues).
|
| All of the open-source code that I wrote for non-material
| reasons, I wrote it because I thought it was fun to write, and
| I open sourced it because others might find it interesting or
| useful. But I never expected any kind of recognition (let alone
| compensation).
|
| In feudal Japan, poets would write poetry anonymously (not
| pseudonymously), and many historians and scholars debate which
| known poet wrote which poem. The fact that these works of art
| are not attached to any author's ego or name, does not diminish
| their beauty after all these centuries -- arguably this
| characteristic amplifies and elevates the work beyond the
| history of people, to the history of ideas and concepts. At the
| end of the day, we are just transient conduits for concepts.
| The notion that a person deserves to have "more" for their
| ideas and concepts and artistry, is as shameful as the notion
| that artists deserve to starve for not slavishly serving the
| whims of the market.
| [deleted]
| mulmen wrote:
| The rare exception to Betteridge's law of headlines.
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