OpenStreetMap charts a controversial new direction
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
If someone manages to take over OSM and put a restrictive license on the data, we'll just fork from the last open version and keep on doing what we do best: we map!
You both state the major reasons why people do it.
I guess I feel lucky hitting the sweet spot of enjoying the work I get to do on open source and be paid for it at the same time.
It's almost as if the absolute quantity of regulation is a wedge issue that has very little to do with the quality of governance.
My notion of regulations isn't about quantity, but about quality. The lower the quality, over time, the higher the quantity. Thus forming a sort of spider-web-like structure, except spider webs are often of greater quality than legislation.
It’s awesome to know you’re also passionate about OSM.
And for many uses there is no viable alternative.
I can see you've received lots of praise for your commitment to open source, your passion about mapping, your contribution to the world. Regardless, the above statement just seems sad and depressing, the acknowledgement and resignation.
Either you didn't mean that word, or you projected into parents' comment something that you believe but that he didn't say nor seem to believe himself.
If that makes me a selfish person (or less commendable than the OP), so be it.
The farmers ploughs the fields and harvests the crops, and earns his reward. Others will take that crop and make billions more in distribution, retail sales, as ingredients in other foods and so on.
Each works for his reward, and if the satisfaction you get is not enough then you need to seek a space elsewhere in the value chain.
If it is enough then don't worry about how others extract their value - it doesn't impact on you. The Baker is as worth of his bread as the Farmer is of the wheat.
I'd never be worried about dollars at all after that.
Oh, wait . . .
It's arguing that corporations are contributing data to OSM, but that this somehow... changes the proportion of what kinds of things OSM covers? That traditional users have added "hyperlocal features, such as a neighborhood bench or informal walking path" while coporations are adding "roads, buildings, and all other points of interest" and "a particular emphasis on improving road data".
How is this anything but good? As long as data is correct, the more data the better -- proportions are meaningless. Buildings and roads aren't taking away from benches and paths. And I'm pretty sure buildings and roads are benefiting all users anyways, no matter who contributes them.
I'm utterly baffled by what logic the author imagines this is a bad thing. The data is open, so it's not like corporations are winding up with exclusive ownership of anything.
So what's the problem...?
A devils advocate answer of course, I'm personally on the fence on the issue.
The solution, I think, would be a mandatory date field specifying when the data was accurate, and only allowing updates with more recent data.
That's the kind of thing that happens when someone is paid pennies per edit and given insufficient resources to guide those edits, which really only happens when someone points a hose of money at a contractor.
I've long been a fan of a mandatory time field! Now to get Stack Overflow to implement it too :)
Even at that time though, it seemed like the corporate support was, on balance, a positive thing. The main worry at that time (for me anyway) was some corp getting smart and pitching themselves as a middleman for other big corps. Luckily the contenders all got slurped up by big corps in a feast of mutually assured destruction, and since no one could trust their future to be built on a competitor's playground, they seem to have all defaulted to OSM.
Similar to Linux, having a diverse set of medium sized corps on your team (and maybe a few really big ones that see you as a complement, not a competitor) seems to be a winning strategy.
It's happened to me. Not just on maps, but on Wikipedia.
Same as the parent poster, I'm baffled. This article makes no sense to me. If it had a point to made, it buried it in thousands of words of blabbering.
I mean just look at them: https://i1.wp.com/thirdeyemom.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08...
How can Google map roads in the Americas with their terrible roads?
We don't make distinctions between any African countries anymore so I think it's only fair we start treating the other continents the same way.
(I mean of parts the US are close enough to third world countries anyways, 11 year olds dying in mobile homes because corrupt leaders hobbled basic utilities and all)
They're all the same sh*thole countries anyways with corrupt leaders full of murders and rapists right?
One let a TV clown run them into the ground, another is run by drug cartels, awful continent.
If I, a Ghanaian, have to constantly go by "African", then the US being lumped in with Hati shouldn't be inaccurate at all.
Weird you thought otherwise.
Canada - Canadians, Mexico - Mexicans, Brazil - Brazilians.
United States - ......United Statesians?
That's like people from the DRC calling themselves 'Democratic Republic of the Congolesians.' Nope, they just shortened it to Congolese. The United States of America just did the same thing. 'Americans.'
They all use it, and for the most part so do their neighbors.
Until some clever soul figures out a better way for the bologna of the North American sandwich to refer to it's citizens, the largest collection of English speakers on the planet will probably keep on trucking with the same boring term.
The point isn't there should be a word for it, the point is Africa is not a damn country. Such obvious facetiousness but thick skulls can only fixate on "wHuT amErIcAnS Are thE US"
South Africa has as much in common Sudan as the US has with Haiti
There are plenty of countries on the continent than can (and have been) mapped by Google Maps.
Saying that Africa is somehow inhospitable to Google Maps is exactly like acting like North America is inhospitable to Google Maps because Haiti has bad roads.
Hell I'd take driving on the roads in that Haiti picture over some in places like "Chiraq", probably less chance of a bad outcome in a Google Maps car.
Indians?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...
United States - Total English Speakers: 283,160,411
India - Total English Speakers: 246,344,737
That being said I think the table is wrong because the numbers don't add up to the total and also don't match the source. Based on that census India should have only 12.18% of English speakers, not 22.18%, so you should be correct in any cases.
And I'm not sure what makes you think I'm not a native speaker of English.
Apparently you don't even understand blatant sarcasm, are you one?
I know it well.
> And I'm not sure what makes you think I'm not a native speaker of English.
You apparently don't know the definition of "American". I have never seen a native speaker make a mistake like that.
> Apparently you don't even understand blatant sarcasm, are you one?
I understand sarcasm just fine. Calling a Haitian road "American" is not sarcasm. Yes, English is my first and only language.
You said a picture was from the USA, and I doubted this, so I went and spent time chasing down the actual source. That's not facetiousness or sarcasm, that's either an innocent error, or misleading and antisocial. I interpreted it as innocent error, and attempted to politely correct your knowledge and explain, and now you reply with this argumentative comment, implying you deliberately attempted to mislead and waste our time. I won't reply further.
Person implies somehow Africa, the continent, is somehow unsuitable for Google maps vehicles (despite the fact Google has mapped hundreds of tens of thousands of miles in multiple countries in the continent)
This comes from treating all of Africa like it's one giant country with the same infrastructure everywhere.
I facetiously (a word you do NOT understand apparently) show a picture of Haiti, a North American country and say, since their roads are terrible all North American roads are terrible, and refer to an entire continent as if it were a single country that includes the US.
From here your subpar English skills fail you, to the point I'm forced to use a word somewhat similar to facetious but not quite as accurate (sarcasm) because the proper word is above your understanding.
Sometimes being imprecise allows a person with a challenged vocabulary such as yourself to catch up, but of course the Dunning-Kruger effect is in full force here, so you use it as an assertation that you're not the one failing to understand basic vocabulary.
It's a shame English is your only language and yet mastery of it escapes you.
The OpenStreetMap Foundation's governance [1] isn't tied to who contributes data. Is there any evidence they are being "corrupted" in any way at all by corporations adding data?
And like any open project, if its governance were captured by "bad guys", users can always fork it and "vote with their feet" since the data's open.
If OSM really was being subject to a hostile board takeover by corporations then obviously that would be hugely newsworthy and concerning. But it's like the article is trying to stoke fears of this while presenting zero actual facts to support it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap_Foundation#Gover...
This is a very old strategy. Companies (especially the large, name-brand ones) aren't getting involved because they believe in the mission/objectives of OSM but rather that they see a strategic advantage in their involvement. They dip their toes in, get entrenched and then make their move. It's a lot faster and less expensive for them than trying to replicate what the project has produced.
And did the original contributors fork the project to a new successful initiative? Or if not, why not?
I'm also curious why companies feel the need for this -- if the data is all open in the first place, why do the companies even need to bother? Why don't they just use the data directly?
Without specific examples it's hard to understand.
That's not to say corporate involvement/sponsorship isn't important: it's vital to many important projects. The issue is when companies start trying to influence the projects beyond their technical needs and start trying to wrap their business model around them (a good indicator of that seems to be their involvement in governance) that the trouble starts. I think that's the concern being expressed about OSM.
One thing that happened when Pokemon Go got popular is that people (users) were conducting vandalism, in the sense that many pokemon figures were added to the main map of OSM. People have to work really hard to remove these, and they might burn out on this. There is already a lot of vandalism, like people adding their friends drinking shed, or whatever they think of as funny.
Another thing that already happens with volunteers, is people thinking their working area is "their area", while no such concept exists. This can already give a lot of friction among volunteers. I can imagine if billions in money are at stake, big companies with a massive crowd of emplyees might want to really grab those working areas and drown out volunteers. If that gets a big problem, volunteers that were active for years might drop out.
What'll often happen is a well-meaning person will come by, often using an editor that doesn't differentiate between types of bicycling, and change the route to be tagged highway=cycleway. This is the tag for things like paved bike paths, such as urban cycling infrastructure.
The result is now these mountain bike trails, narrow/rocky/tight/steep stuff, shows up in tools that offer bike commuters directions. Just... not great.
So many of us keep an eye on the stuff in our area to see that the tags stay as they should.
I don't know much about land-owners doing vandalism, often people try to communicate, sometimes this works out okay.
I don't know anything about mapping public Wifi access, like in shopping centres.
What I meant is that already some people feel like their city and a 30km radius around it is "their area" and they want to control what and how things get mapped there. It can lead to heated and emotional discussions, we are people after all :) If a big company with lots of human resources would do this, there is hardly any fighting back.
It bothers me that this sentence is used as if the facts behind it are a logical arrangement of consequences. The fact that people are prevented from accessing data that they funded, and by all rights own, is an absurdity.
I appreciate that OSM exists, but in a perfect world, it shouldn't have to.
I (and several others) used to trace these maps (by hand, using OziExplorer) then offer them for download in Garmin/MapDekode format. OSM didn't even exist at the point.
Most government data was only available on 9-track tapes. So few media outlets had the necessary equipment that reporters' groups would publish step-by-step information about how to get it done, and with what hardware.
On the consumer level? Forget about it.
Now almost all of that data available online for free from their website, and they have ways to access it in bulk and via API.
I think the bigger problem nowadays is accessing GIS data from different cities and local governments. Many states and cities put the data online, but each one organizes it differently, possibly in different formats, with different methods for accessing it.
Then you have cases like the Ordnance Survey in the UK where apparently a lot of the data is neither freely available to the general public, nor paid for by the general public.
But that's the rub, we the taxpayers have paid for all the map creation, even the new high resolution ones with far greater accuracy, yet we're stuck with these older, lower resolution and likely out-of-date maps. Even the new maps should be public domain.
* US Geological Survey: https://www.usgs.gov/core-science-systems/ngp/tnm-delivery
* National Park Service: https://mapservices.nps.gov/arcgis/rest/services
* US Forest Service: https://www.fs.usda.gov/visit/maps (the API access is further down that page).
Those linked above typically available through a standard API (Tile Map Service), as well as ESRI's moderately well documented REST API for accessing shapefiles and features. My one complaint about this data is how the USFS manages their data. In that case it seems each service region defines how data should be made available, so you have a pile of different methods for accessing things like road/trail features, or points of interest (in many cases, it comes down to "fetch this pile of ZIP files").
This is great, and we can go the extra mile on OpenStreetMap because of it, but these sources are not a replacement for OpenStreetMap; the goals are different and the data presented on it is different. On OSM points-of-interest are important. Things like shops, attractions, schools, museums, etc. Government maps don't have these. Municipal maps may have streets drawn in as areas accurate to the centimetre, but that is not the same as the graph of routable ways that OSM has (not just for cars, but for bicycles and pedestrians as well).
OpenStreetMap mappers can make great use of government sources where permitted, but a good digital map is much more.
Well not exactly. E.g. in the Netherlands we have open building and address data. It took the community, with many volunteers, like a year to import that into OpenStreetMap.
Compiling open data into a comprehensive map without duplicate data or rough edges is a lot of work. I agree that all governments can make this a huge lot easier by just publishing what they already made with public funding, but that doesn't mean OSM would suddenly cease to have a right to exist. It would just be able to improve its quality even further.
In a perfect world, rather, commercial maps shouldn't have to exist.
Is this also true for software? https://publiccode.eu
I am very pleased that corporations are helping us with the map. It can sometimes be annoying when somebody who isn't from the area messes some complicated intersection based on old satellite imagery. It is awesome when a corporation adds large numbers of features that I never would have added. More contributions is a net positive.
The only concern I have is that corporations may seek to prevent OSMF from offering competing map services. Mapbox might, for example, seek to hamstring the openstreetmap.org tile server in order to push people to their commercial offering. This is largely theoretical but is a large concern of mine. As long as core technologies are Free/Open Source, we can always pack up and fork if it becomes problematic.
And not a whiff that they are contributing back in substantial ways on the whole either
Seems like all giant corporations are one way or another not respecting the spirit of the mission of the organization and often aren’t receptive to community feedback in any substantial way
Edit: maybe leeches (that was my previous statement) is harsh, however I stand by my assertion that the spirit of the project isn’t being taken into consideration in this instance. Whenever FaceBook, Apple etc can make it proprietary they will rather than share data and compete on things like user experience. They could do much better in this regard. I don’t believe personally that it’s the developers at that company per se that are the issue this is an issue with industry politics and open source policies etc.
So much so the article is more about who controls the organisation.
I personally see this mostly as a good thing. More data, better data, and everyone gets value out of it: users and corporations. Surely it's a sign this project is doing things right.
However I think it's right that the article points at the power structure of this organisation, I think now more than ever it's important it remains independent.
Sometimes they are not contributing. There have been complaints about contractors employed by the big firms adding non-existent roads, tagging roads wrongly, etc. The concern is that because the big firms are so big and now have power over OSM governance, they can simply ignore all those community members who are noticing their persistent mistakes and asking them to stop.
But a contractor who's paid for their work, even if it's not very good? They'll just keep going so they don't lose their job.
not sure that's really a problem that needs solving.
How have you achieved this conclusion when the entire article is about how corporations are contributing back, and the fear that those contributions might cause the devaluation of volunteer contributions? There’s even half a dozen visualisations to demonstrate the extent of their contributions.
It’s a tussle, because I personally came away that the ethos of the community isn’t being respected and the fear is they’ll overrun the mission of the organization.
It’s complicated and nuanced to be sure., which is why I amended my original comment
I don't know if this has changed with newer versions of the google maps API, but years ago when I had the choice of using google maps or OSM, the biggest motivator in my decision, when OSM was still a lot less complete, was to do with Google's licensing.
There was a clause that implied they'd have some rights to reproduce and use our data and that was totally unacceptable for our use case. OSM was completely free to use without worries that google was somehow going to be able to use our data in some way.
* Mapping is not purely factual, some things can be mapped in different ways and corporations might map things that conflict with how normal people see them. Maybe an example would be deleting a commonly used path through cooperate headquarters that was made for staff/visitors.
* Too much data in niche areas like driveways overwork volunteers and steers attention away from citizen areas of work
* Governance model, fears corporations will get too much control through sponsorships
I see these as valid issues but I think they can be worked through. For me it has been extremely nice to have a free and open data source for projects and the OSM data model is really easy to use I think. I feel the benefits outweigh the problems but I am only a user looking from the outside.
We've had a bit of an issue in the UK with Amazon Logistics mappers blatting away some of the nuance in rights-of-way mapping (which is quite a complex subject in UK law) as they map driveways for their own use.
That's not a massive problem in itself - OSM has reasonably good communication mechanisms (particularly changeset comments), and there's a clear Organised Edit Policy which most of the big guys follow. It's just a challenge because of scale: it's hard for part-time, unpaid volunteers to spend hours chasing after the countless Amazon contractors who are sitting editing OSM all day. I know we've lost a few individual contributors because of this, though more in the US than in Europe.
But this is mostly growing pains. With goodwill from all sides I don't see any reason it won't be resolved.
> deleting a commonly used path through cooperate headquarters that was made for staff/visitors
That would be vandalism. The correct action is adding the tag:
access=private
OSM has a rather straightforward way of mapping things: if it's there, we map it. If the USA claims to own Poland, then we do nothing. If the USA actually occupies parts of Poland, then we change the tags to reflect that reality. Not to indicate that they own it, perhaps, but at least to indicate that it's stably under their control. Conflicts (I'm a moderator in an OSM chat, it can get very heated) mostly arise from people who don't like reality and want it to be shown differently. But their issue is with the renderer, e.g. OsmAnd, for showing it as belonging to what they perceive to be really theirs and unfairly occupied. But that doesn't change what the underlying data should show: reality. I'm having a hard time thinking of what would create a true conflict without clear solution.
I cannot believe that this example represents a meaningful source of conflict.
AllTrails does close to zilch to help put trails into the maps, even though the majority of trails are user-generated content.
Strava has let "Slide", their one project that could help put trails on the map, die an ungracious death.
If you build a whole business model on top of free data, it may be worth considering improving that data.
but I do find this whole discussion strange, because it's rather obviously the same problem that open-source _anything_ has: you're giving something away for free, and it's very hard if not impossible to control how that data gets used or whether the primary benefactors contribute back anything to the source.
Ironically, the only known model of forcing people/corporations to contribute something back based on their usage of something is called "market-based pricing".
Unless someone is proposing that maps are somehow ethically or systematically different, than, say, Linux, this conversation feels rather unspecific and pointless.
I'm very interested in working towards an open tooling and open data ecosystem for rock climbing information, but I don't know where to get started on finding others to build it with.
There may be one already, I haven't checked.
The two maps follow the same paths obviously, but at least in my region the routes and segments on strava don't ever seem to start or stop at the trail intersections in the OSM maps and often cross unmapped and unofficial connectors that don't appear on OSM. The extent of their reliance on OSM trail data seems to be that they use MapBox tile images and those tiles sometimes have OSM trail names marked on them.
The parent comment probably talks about giving Strava user uploaded data/tracks back to the OSM community so they improve the map (or add new paths themselves). In a way they already do https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Strava#Data_Permission_-... Allowing tracing is more than other companies offer and gladly accepted. It regularly leads to new unmapped paths discovered, sometimes on private ground (military areas) that are otherwise inaccessable to an OSM mapper.
yeah, that's what i was saying about the tiles - their tiles come from mapbox, which means they include OSM data and therefore must include the attribution. but the claim was that they're heavily reliant on OSM's trail data, and I just haven't seen any evidence of that.
The downside is high (you get a bad reputation as being an evil corpo) and the upside is limited. So, for the moment, we just hold the corrections on our side and overlay them on top.
If you're an actual corp you don't care about that, but being labeled an evil corpo will ruin things if you want to cooperate. And we're a small startup.
I'll revisit it some time but we're being cautious about it.
I guess you could still get criticized for not fixing them yourselves though.
The things lots of people in the OSM community want to see are willingness to cooperate and willingness to communicate. Making throwaway accounts obviously doesn't accomplish those things.
(there's value into letting people quietly make contributions; reducing community hassles associated with systematic changes isn't really where that value lies)
There is a real issue where it doesn't make sense for a small volunteer organization to manage a massive amount of data that is not of interest to a broader set of users. It's not a huge issue, because the narrow interests mostly understand the basic issue, there's just not universal agreement about what is broadly useful or not.
A look at much of the internet and the declining role of academic guiding principles wrt technology and its governance tells you where this might be headed..
Hope OSM somehow can find a golden middle way that incorporates "grassroots"/cute data like benches as well as large-scale and tedious to maintain data such as roads or road signs. Don't let 'em eat you.
If that’s the case, is that essentially asking for a map with less data so their own contribution can be a bigger fraction of the total data?
To be fair, how interesting it can be totally depends on the community of your city. The place I used to live seem to have one or two people that are very passionate, almost all the buildings are marked and often have interesting tidbits and trivia attached to them. I used to spend hours reading it. The city I currently live, on the contrary, is relatively dry in that regard. Still useful, but not something I can binge-read on.
On the technical side though, I feel like they're always lacking even before the whole GMaps API thing. It has so many bugs (and site is slow), to a point that viewing or editing become annoying from time to time.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Strava
Similar to BSD licence, this is beyond their legal requirement and is some kind of token of good faith in what seems a mutually beneficial relationship. I'm sure they could do more and it's an open question on how to get those that benefit most to contribute in similar proportion but I'd think there must be better targets to call out.
But doesn't that automatically imply that the current way of verifying OSM data is flawed and needs a better architecture?
Setting aside my personal opinions about feasibility... I think that this is actually a valid use case for a proof-of-map based system that removes the statistical power of a company with too many (maybe unintended) potentially malicious editors.
It is an interesting question how open project should defend against such actions. Without money and without a law protecting them.
As an enthusiast of open source movement especially, it is worrying that such projects are easy targets for wrongdoing. Examples of such actions could could fill a book or two. This is happening for years.
For instance, someone has enthusiastically mapped Coke County, Texas:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=7/32.083/-98.465
I haven't looked into it, but chances are it is just a result of them living there, and it creates a huge bias in the data in Texas.
Or low paid contractors damaging unrelated data while doing this.
But adding accurate data is highly welcome!