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Comment by netsectoday | Hacker News Reader

Do you know that Microsoft Bing maps also "steals" the OSM data? They did some very clever "reverse stealing" as well when they contributed back to the project by providing millions of accurate building footprints.

Yes, I'm being sarcastic. It's a win-win situation when ANY large mapping group joins OSM. At the very least; they will accidentally contribute road-level improvements when they work with the data. I rely upon OSM data and need these large players throwing their weight behind this mapping system.

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I think you're missing the forrest for the trees here - they put "steal" in ""s because they know it's not stealing.

The point of their comment was to criticise TomTom for not doing much interesting themselves, not to discuss the nuances of OSM. In this context, "steal" makes sense because it's something that TomTom can claim to be innovative with while actually the innovation credit belongs to OSM.

License aside Microsoft at least provided Bing satellite imagery source for OSM mappers before there was Maxar and others. Actually there were others before (was it Yahoo?) but that is not the point.

Now imagine if Tomtom and Microsoft both paid users for map improvements. That would be super cool.

They could even make an app to submit the improvements and even show me ads, I don't care. I would still do it.

in practice you can't trust a bounty system like this, so the next best might be to sell your company products in such a way as to minimize the system friction between new sales, new data coming in from those new sales, and feeding back to the open ecosystem. In that latter case, you can't trust the company management, but to my mind .. that's the breaks

> you can't trust a bounty system like this

You mean the accuracy of the data? I guess that is why a lot of systems have “validators” or something like that in place.

But it’s a problem with OSM and wikipedia in general.

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