Bing Maps Streetside Imagery Now Integrated into OpenStreetMap iD Editor | Hacker News Reader

Bing Maps Streetside Imagery Now Integrated into OpenStreetMap iD Editor

blogs.bing.com

272 pointswangyjx46 comments

Regardless of the motivations behind doing this (cynics could easily suggest it is a direct attack on Google Maps) this is great news for both OSM and the broader mapping ecosystem.

The data OSM provides is immensely valuable and enables some really empowering applications.

Of course it’s an attack on Google Maps, and that’s a good thing. People should be happy to have Microsoft’s help in fighting Google because Google is much scarier than Microsoft these days.

Google is scarier than Microsoft was even in its peak. Google controls most of the world's information, can shape thoughts with search algorithms, can destroy businesses (including competitors) with changes in ad policies, bid processes and search algorithms. Microsoft at its peak could threaten suppliers and some competitors...Google can practically destroy any company/person in any vertical if it so chose.

> Google can practically destroy any company/person in any vertical if it so chose.

Yet they don't. So either they're not as scary as "Microsoft was even at its peak", or maybe they're not as powerful as you make them out to be.

Do we know this?

It is not possible truly to know one way or another at a complete level, although it is unlikely. Saying they are not this powerful is, well, simply not true. It is not possible without creating a huge skunk-works internal project binding people to secrecy.

Google doesn't have the power to bind people to secrecy in the same way that say, the CIA, FBI, or NSA do. It does not mean that they do not have the capability of doing these things.

The key difference btw Google and Microsoft is this:

If MS harmed you, you'd know. If Google intends to harm you, it looks like a stroke of bad luck.

All they have to do is hide the tree (you the person they intend to harm) within the forest (thousands of other sites/businesses) affected by the same policy change.

You could go months without finding out. And if you ever do, it's extremely difficult to prove foul play.

What makes you say they haven't? There have been many stories of search algorithm changes hurting businesses

http://www.smeinsider.com/2015/06/23/google-is-ruining-small...

for one

The sheep are afraid of the sheepdog because it looks too much like the wolf.

The sheep would do wise to remember that the sheepdog and the shepherd aren't good actors - the fate of the sheep is to be sheared and eaten.

Aditionally, it's (mostly) possible to avoid contact with microsoft by simply not using their products. With google, you can't help their ads in webpages, their hosting the email or messaging services your friends use; if someone send me a docx file, I can open in libreoffice, if they send me a google doc, I can't avoid it.

> it's (mostly) possible to avoid contact with microsoft by simply not using their products

I don't know what your vocation is, but avoiding Windows, Office and/or Exchange is a choice a very large number of people cannot make.

My boss asked me if I'd played around with VS Code the other day. I said "are you thinking about switching us to Macs?"

grumble

Google's advantages seem brittle, as their moats aren't as concrete as Microsoft's, and their revenue sources aren't diversified at all. People could replace their relationship to Google far more easily than with Microsoft.

If ChromeOS doesn't take off, I wonder if Google could be temporarily locked out of mainstream desktops and laptops in the AI assistant race.

Hmm, this depends. Microsoft has windows and office but most of the business now happens in the cloud. I try to avoid using google product but were I an advertiser my only other option is facebook.

You mean like ISPs? Oh wait, it can't. Please stop throwing this impression of Google's invincibility around. You know there are forces that Google can't even come close to defeating.

It's not new. MS allows the OSM community to trace from Bing aerial imagery since 2010! And from 2007 till 2011 Yahoo allowed tracing from their aerial imagery. These have been very very helpful to OSM.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bing_Maps https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Aerial_Imagery

Good news. These types of data intensive apps ( Google search, Google Maps etc ) are one of the greatest threats to the open web because they make it very painful to switch to an alternate provider. Keeping this type of data open ( along with open data interchange formats ) could improve competition in service providers

It's actually trivially easy to switch from Google search and maps, just type in a different URL or change a setting on your browser. It's only "hard" because the alternatives are just not as good. The fact the the alternatives have to work so hard to stay competitive might suggest that open data intensive apps just aren't as good of a model for delivering quality content. We've seen this play out before with the iOS and Mac OS X hatred before tech folks turned from hating MS to Apple to now, Google/FB.

This title seems inaccurate. The article makes it sound like the data is just retrieved, from Microsoft, when using a specific editor. OSM doesn’t actually have the data nor are they are distributing it.

Yes, I don't believe they are licensing the data.

(edit: my mistake, there is a license of sorts, see the comment below)

It's a narrow license, allowing the imagery to be used to verify information being added to OSM:

https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/pull/5050#issuecomment-3...

Question 3 is the interesting part giving some examples of how they expect it to be used and an example of how it shouldn't be used.

Exactly. The title is pretty bad. All they are doing is displaying the data in one particular editor. It's like displaying google streetmaps in another window when you edited open streetmaps - there is no "contribution" of data at all.

This is not true. What you described would violate Google’s copyright on their mapping data (or the copyright owner they’ve licensed it from, depending on the data).

this +100000. The huge-ness of this contribution to making openstreetmap better is underscored by the fact that you're not allowed to do this with Google Street View (Section 10) https://developers.google.com/maps/terms

The article’s title is: Bing Maps Streetside Imagery Now Integrated into OpenStreetMap iD Editor.

The current title here on HN which is just wrong is: Microsoft contributed 5PB street view data to OpenStreetMap.

Microsoft continues to make me want to like them, it’s strange

> it’s strange

it's not. They've lost their dominant position (mind-share wise at least) and is clamouring to get it back. Google, on the other hand, has gained a dominant position, and got complacent lately; and people are starting to lose faith in them.

But in the end, the goal is to ensure they have good PR.

You don't need to like them, just continue to hold the stock you bought when Ballmer stepped down. It will probably be obvious when it's time to sell.

Is this just a case of this uneasy friendliness that MS has had recently toward the open ecosystem, or is MS trying to play a big-league game to combat Google Map's dominance?

It's both. Microsoft is all in on cloud services and infrastructure. They want full ecosystem for Azure customers, and GeoAPIs are important for many users. Next, with upcoming HoloLens they want devs to create some amazing real-time lens apps.

Microsoft is big in the public sector in Europe, as in, really really big. Open street map is big in the public sector in Europe, as in really really big.

It’s probably not related, but who knows.

Microsoft gave OSM permission to use their aerial imagery for tracing in November 2010. If you look at this as a continuation of that it isn't terribly recent.

Although the only reason MS is doing this to undermine Google, it's a win for open source. Competition helps.

I am operating a fleet of vehicles that have multiple cameras on them.

I would like to contribute to an open source community that can have work with OSM, freely. Is there an option for this? Other than mapillary.

There's OpenStreetCam, but it isn't a whole lot different than Mapillary.

I think it will be a while before there is a community project accepting many gigabytes of photos every day.

Many years ago (before the advent of OpenStreetCam or Mapillary) I proposed a federated scheme where various entities could obtain their own dirt-cheap http hosting (backblaze?) and simply submit indexes (or make available in an easily discoverable fashion) of the image metadata for centralized tools to pull together, but this was dismissed as lunacy.

I still don't think it would be too tricky to do and would nicely decouple the fundamental storage/hosting problem from all the other problems that might need solving.

What I thought was particularly interesting was how EXIF data tends to be near the beginning of a JFIF file which could allow "cheap" bulk scanning of jpeg metadata by using http 1.1 ranges.... who knows.

Why not Mapillary?

Is there a good Android app using OSM that will give me public transportation directions in the main cities of the world?

Until them I'm stuck with Google Maps.

Moovit uses OpenStreetMap to generate its map tiles, Citymapper uses it for its walking and perhaps cycling directions. OSMAnd has quite good tools for visualising public transport routes, for instance you can plot subway routes on top of the street map, and you can select bus stops, see the buses stopping there, then select the route and see its full path and all stops mapped.

Transportr is an alternative, but it's still a long way to go to compete with Google Maps, Citymapper and the like.

https://transportr.grobox.de/

I think Maps.Me did something in that direction - but well, the quality of the underlying data varies wildly. Google can (and IMHO does) periodically pay for licensing the transport data, OSM doesn't do that (for cost and license compatibility, amongst other things). Not all PT authorities are amenable to open data :(

They are starting. You can get routing for Underground in some cities. But if you check OSM there is a lot of data. I think that all what is missing is a algorithm to make the routing.

As an OSM contributor, I beg to differ. "Just an algorithm" needs to take into account all the different ways in which the data is input, guess at possible transfers (again, stops might be mapped, but are they reachable from each other?), and that's before we get to the issue of stale data (infrastructure might be mapped, but the line numbering and routing changes at a moment's notice).

So yeah, it looks easy at first glance.

Commitment to make things right, seems to be on track for Microsoft! Great going

It does seem genuine...but the fear of another SCO-like submarine lingers.

That's really nice!

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