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Comment by valine | Hacker News Reader

Open source works well when the work is inherently cool and challenging enough to keep people engaged. Linux and Blender are two of the most successful open source projects, and the thing they have in common is that problems they solve are problems engineers enjoy working on.

Mapping intersections is extremely boring in comparison. The sheer quantity of boring work needed to bring open street maps up to the quality of google maps in insurmountable.

LLMs are freaking cool, and that bodes well for their viability as open source projects.

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And arguably Blender is much more innovative and achieving faster progress than proprietary and commercial software such as Autodesk Maya.

My impression is that open street maps problem is not the map quality. In areas I have used it, it often has details (e.g. small hiking paths, presence of bike lanes) that google maps doesn't have.

The issue is search. Searching for things that you don't know precisely (music bars in this area). This type of data/processing on top of the geospatial was always subpar and very hit or miss in my experience.

That’s not my experience. I work in downtown Minneapolis and open street maps is missing basic things like entrances to public parking lots. Open street maps has a problem if it can’t get details right in population dense areas.

It really depends, but in germany (has a large OSM community) OSM has so much better quality & detail for almost everything except buisnesses. It suffers from poor search, routing that doesn't take traffic jams or roadworks into account and a lack of high quality apps and thus only "nerds" use it instead of Google Maps or others.

It's very hit and miss, as it's dependant on how many perfectionistic mapping enthusiasts that edit OSM as a hobby are in your area.

Databases are another data point that fit this pattern. They’re not sexy and commercial players like Oracle have moat.

That's ... probably not the best example, given the fact that there are a shedload of open-source databases of various types that have forced major commercial vendors like MSFT and ORCL into a corner. ORCL's moat is that they have a large portfolio of random solutions, are incumbent at a lot of organizations where switching costs are very high, and they have an exceptionally aggressive sales organization that doesn't seem to worry too much about legalities.

Have you heard of PostgreSQL, MariaDB, or SQLite? They have very high market share.

Databases are very sexy? They're super interesting from programming/CS perspective for multiple reasons.

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