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Comment by dragonsh | Hacker News Reader

Don't trust for profit organizations. Google might project itself as champion of open source but the reality is their revenue, is a result of standing on open source. Without gnu and Linux they will not even exist. When they needed google maps users they opened up. But given their profit motive they will have to shut down others which conflict with their profit. Its better to port service to something open source, like openstreetmap. Google is turning into, do every evil to generate value for shareholders. I think RMS fears of closed source js are true. It's like Windows Binary blobs.

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I've tried using OpenStreetMap -- but it doesn't seem to know the names of places I go to, or sometimes even the area I'm in when I type certain city names.

maps.google.com works great though. I wish I wasn't supporting Google's massive operations but it is convenient to use.

Have you looked at http://www.geonames.org/ ?

I've used this for a place database and really liked it. They provide data dumps of the database (as well as diffs between previous dumps) so we don't need to rely on their web APIs, and still have the data in case geonames ever shuts down. They also offer a paid service, which should guarantee some sort of protection against a random shutdown.

AFAIK they don't have path/street data, just a massive location dataset, so you can't use it for directions by itself.

Do you mean you're using the map on https://www.openstreetmap.org/ to search for things? This map isn't really meant to be searched, and the usability is generally terrible, I'm not sure why they keep it up on the website. Zooming in over my workplace (in Miami, FL) and searching "Pizza" brings up results for Italy and Nigeria.

OpenStreetMap is a great datasource and set of APIs though, on which other people have built really useful map applications. But OSM itself is not an attempt to compete with all of Google Maps, just to provide high quality tiles, path/nodes and place database to developers.

Yep. osm.org's search is only a placename search, basically.

What's the open source alternative to maps.google.com then? Or is it just not yet built?

The point is that osm.org is not intended for end users. I learned it the hard way ;) And osm.org just shows the data best for mappers.

Also the address search is good but not perfect due to lack of data but also limited software.

But the nice thing about OSM as a developer is: you can do anything with this data. Build your own address searcher, routing engine and mapping stuff etc.

Anyone can contribute to OpenStreetMap.

So if you find something missing, you may consider spending the time to add the missing information so that we can have maps that are owned in common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Database_License

Honest question: why Google couldn't exist with FreeBSD instead of GNU and Linux? I assume that only GCC would be used in that case.

During time when Sergei and Larry wrote code for Google. It won't have been possible for them to survive without huge costs, if not using gnu tools and many gpl utilities, bsd code is their but not as much at that time. Moreover using bsd and then earning by making it closed source is even worse without contributing back. Indeed for that matter even today they won't survive without gpl code. The amount of gpl code used within Google compared to the code they contributed back you will still see a huge gap.

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