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Comment by samaparicio | Hacker News Reader

Of companies mentioned in the article, the asymmetric contributions to OSM that bother me the most are AllTrails and Strava - 2 companies that heavily rely on trail data sourced from OSM.

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.

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Strava worked with Mapbox when they were switching over. I don't know what exactly the deal was, but Mapbox employees added a bunch of missing stuff to OSM based on Strava data analysis.

https://github.com/mapbox/mapping/issues/114

I don't think you're wrong...

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.

There's a similar problem with websites which map rock climbing routes. Some make their data open to some extent, but not in a way that can be meaningfully contributed back to OSM. Even though they all use OSM data (usually via Mapbox), to generate their maps, and allow users to draw and annotate layers on top of it.

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.

You are welcome to make a channel on https://slack.openstreetmap.us/ .

There may be one already, I haven't checked.

Does strava actually use the trail data from OSM? as far as i can tell, the routes on strava are entirely contributed by strava users and don't come from OSM in any way.

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.

Strava's map are based on OpenStreetMap, there is attribution in the bottom right corner of every map (not sure where in the mobile app, I'm not an active user).

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.

>Strava's map are based on OpenStreetMap

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.

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