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Comment by cheeaun | Hacker News Reader

I’m curious to know if the companies that use OSM actually contribute back? Like fixing all the wrong/malicious data.

Microsoft Bing made its aerial imagery available for OSM editing, this is often very very very useful for mapping.

See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/maps/product/imagery-service...

> The rights that you have under this agreement are limited solely to aerial imagery use in a non-commercial online editor application of OpenStreetMap maps (an "Application")

Yes: https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/

> nearly 17% of the global road network was last edited by a corporate data-team member.

...and their share of edits is growing. Maybe one day OSM mappers will wake up and realize they provide free labor to corporate giants that sucks economic value from community. Hopefully it will be not too late.

Corporations, whether giant or not, create products which people chose to purchase because they are useful. That's creating value, not sucking value.

Sometimes a corporation can "suck value" by using anticompetitive behavior to prevent competitors from offering better/cheaper products to consumers. But in this case, Google is the big corporation, and contributions to OSM benefit smaller competitors at the expense of Google, creating more options and more value for consumers overall.

Can you expand on how contributions suck economic value from the community? What community, and what value is being lost?

The economic value left on the table by volunteers is consumed not by the ones who need it most, but by people who need it the least. This breaks the 2nd principle of justice as formulated by Rawls. Shall I say more...

As a user of OSM (and having contributed in the past but that's not relevant to my point) it looks like, to me, that if their share of edits is growing that they are providing free labor to me and people like me, no?

Yes, it is mentioned many times in the article itself; several paragraphs in fact.

Here is a few:

> Apple uses OSM data in parts of the world where their commercial partners don’t provide data. They are reasonably good at fixing and contributing data to OSM in those regions. They employ nobody in the OSM community.

> Microsoft Bing uses OSM in several regions, and is slowly moving from it’s traditional providers to OSM globally. They provide machine-learning (ML) datasets that they have computed from areal imagery. They employ nobody in the OSM community.

Klokantech uses OSM data as a base data for their Maptiler platform.

They maintains and contributed to some open source tool and they are hosting (for free) some open source maps.

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