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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

I work in geospatial stuff and we use OSM data. There's things I'd contribute back but the community is notoriously prickly. You make a couple of mistakes not made out of malice and they'll assume you're corpos out to fuck everyone because that's what evil corpos do.

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.

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I don’t want to reinforce your feeling (I can imagine exactly the pain you’re talking about) but isn’t there a legal requirement for map corrections to be published? They don’t have to go back into OSM, but they do have to be made available because of the share—a-like concept of the license. At least, I thought so.

There is a subtlety to when the license applies. We have outside counsel for this and they have it covered, not to worry.

One pretty low risk way to share back is to just publish the issues somehow.

I guess you could still get criticized for not fixing them yourselves though.

You can add Map Notes which aren't seen as threatening to the extent some apps that use OSM as their base map let their users directly send them in https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Notes

Edit: It's a shame you can't find a way to make those edits available to OSM.

This isn't welcome behavior (I think there's not significant technical limitation on it 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)

Well it was an honest question, not a suggestion. I suppose there are good reasons for that policy, just seems a shame to lose out on good honest updates because people are afraid to post without anonymity.

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