Hacker News Reader

Comment by mch82 | Hacker News Reader

The article didn’t answer this, but hinted at a few possibilities (I’ll be checking out the Overture Map project to see if it’s possible to confirm any of these: more corporate friendly governance, different data model, additional standards for map features.

One way to gauge the impact might be to keep any eye on what Meta does with its Daylight Map Distribution project (a clean OSM), https://daylightmap.org/.

View on HN

From the Overture FAQ…

> “Overture is a data-centric map project, not a community of individual map editors. Therefore, Overture is intended to be complementary to OSM. We combine OSM with other sources to produce new open map data sets. Overture data will be available for use by the OpenStreetMap community under compatible open data licenses. Overture members are encouraged to contribute to OSM directly.“

Reading this sound very promising, but i can't stop thinking "Where is the catch?". I would love to trust this project and believe in the good, but looking at the companies that are overture members doesn't help at all.

The catch as I can see it is with the complexity and issues of combining OSM with a bunch of other data sources. This is what Apple used to do before shipping their own maps. Most of us remember some of the highly publicized issues that were associated with that. I also noticed that Apple, who is (was?) also a heavy OSM consumer, is conspicuously missing from this list.

> I also noticed that Apple, who is (was?) also a heavy OSM consumer, is conspicuously missing from this list.

Apple is also a heavy contributor to OSM: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Organised_Editing/Activi...

Apple uses OSM in some countries (mainly “global south” like Africa).

OSM maps are superior to the new maps in some places like Australia, although maybe in irrelevant ways - there’s not really value in having every single building drawn on the map.

I think the catch is simply that the maintainers of OSM are difficult to work with if you’re Apple et al. They wanted a better governance model so they went and made one that they can live with.

ESRI and Microsoft were both already cooperating with Meta (providing data for use with their RapiD editor).

I don't have any special insight, but I expect that Overture is moving that cooperation outside of any of the players.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com