Hacker News Reader

Comment by Acorn | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame that people contribute data to Google Maps when something like Open Street Maps exists.

If I'm going to spend the time it takes to map something, I'd much rather it go into an open source project rather than just improving the product of a for-profit company.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/

View on HN

I would say it is probably because Google makes it very easy to edit maps and it offers navigation. Open Street Map doesn't allow you to enter two addresses and find a route between them. (At least not as far as I can tell.) Therefore if you are living in an area where you want that ability and your local area is not yet mapped, you will map it in Google, not in Open Street Map.

Additionally if you are a business owner you are going to add your business to the map that has more users and searchers. There is little if any benefit to having your business mapped in Open Street Map, whereas having it on the Google Map could potentially bring some customers to you.

OSM is the data. It is not the example map rendering on openstreetmap.org. Sad but true. I wish there was no map at all but instead a selection of nice looking and more useful maps listed.

For routing give these a try:

http://map.project-osrm.org/

http://open.mapquest.com/

http://maps.cloudmade.com/

http://openrouteservice.org/

Compared to proper editors the Google map maker thing is horrifying. I tried to use it once and gave up because it just did not do what I was trying to do (adding 3 simply streets).

http://openrouteservice.org/

The was the only one that opened upon a map over me :-)

That is bad (especially because I personally like that one the least). Could you share details about your configuration?

The idea of Open Street Maps is not to make tools for map viewing or journey planning, it's to collect user contributed mapping data for the world. That data can then be used by any project that wants to use it.

This tool (using OSM data) allows you to view routes http://www.openrouteservice.org/

I agree though, there is a bit of a lack of good quality tools using OSM data, it's a shame.

>> Open Street Map doesn't allow you to enter two addresses and find a route between them.

That isn't true. CloudMade offers a routing service based on OSM data, and a number of applications use that service to offer driving directions

To be precise, OSM is not public domain data. It is under CC-BY-SA and migrating to ODbL. (The migration will probably be painful.)

You can see how the migration is going at http://odbl.de/ Acceptance is very low in Australia.

Everything that people contribute through Map Maker is available freely for non-commercial purposes (with some restrictions). However, the license is certainly not as permissive as Open Street Map.

https://services.google.com/fb/forms/mapmakerdatadownload/

- US data is not available.

- The last update was 4 months ago.

- It is provided in KML format, which is quite difficult to work with in existing spatial tools beyond Google Earth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com