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Comment by Pinus | Hacker News Reader

OSM:s biggest problem seems to be that it offers a product — a map database — that very few people need, and even fewer people can use, while still relying on millions of ordinary people for data collection (which means understanding the data model, which is getting hideously complex, because it tries to encode everything that can be located).

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Individuals may not need it, but companies? The company I work for has multiple products which internally rely on geolocating arbitrary addresses. OSM keeps our costs way down, we only have to pay Google when OSM fails a match and we fall back to the Google Maps API. I doubt we're uncommon in this. OSM had less of a programmatic use when Google's free monthly tiers were large and subsequent costs low, but that hasn't been the case for a good while now.

> which means understanding the data model

This not needed. You can use iD (default in-browser editor) without direct tag use.

On Android you can use StreetComplete that has no exposure to tags or tagging schemes and requires 0 OSM-specific knowledge to use (except creating OSM user account).

> OSM:s biggest problem seems to be that it offers a product — a map database — that very few people need, and even fewer people can use

Most people use it indirectly, that is not some fundamental problem.

The value is in the derivative works (literally hundreds of companies directly and indirectly rely on OSM for their map data).

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