OpenStreetMap: Welcome Apple
blog.osmfoundation.org
blog.osmfoundation.org
"It’s also missing the necessary credit to OpenStreetMap’s
contributors; we look forward to working with Apple to get
that on there."But if anybody would rip of an Apple product, the descendants of mighty Steve would come raining down with swords, axes and lawyers.
Do you really think they did it, to support OSM. Or should I ask myself: "Where is the money?"
The money, they do not have to pay Google anymore for the use of maps, while not crediting all these people, who supported OSM with their time and data-collecting.
I would love to be a fly-on-the wall at the Apple meeting where they are forced to discuss this.
It actually sounds very passive-aggressive to me.
So it might sound passive/aggressive.
But wouldn't Apple be active/aggressive, if I would use their IP? Wouldn't they srew me for all I#m worth in court?
I really don't know, but I wouldn't want to find out...
It seems to me, that the Apple-Folks in Cupertino knew exactly, what they were doing. Who would sue Apple in a case like this anyway?
Being from Germany, I have no idea, what the US-System would look like, but I believe, that suing Apple would mean, that every one of the contributors to OSM would have to sue on his/her own.
And who would do that?
Apple would calculate this. And even, if some people would walk this way, it might still be cheaper, than paying Google.
Just my two cents.
With an army of IP lawyers at their disposal, a multi-billion dollar war chest, and an opponent running on a shoe-string, they can probably force OSM to go all-in if it comes to a lawsuit.
The cynical part of me sees this as great publicity for iPhoto using the P.T. Barnum principle:
"I don't care what they say about me, just make sure they spell my name right! "
To this very particular point I want to say, I think that large companies switching over to open technologies (edit: because of a profit motive) is a good thing. There needs to be a critical mass of people who value the openness per se in order for the sea change to happen, but ultimately it has to be because we make it more profitable to do so. I have zero expectations that a bunch of CEOs are going to start caring about any cause. If they switch over, it means we're succeeding in making it profitable, and I take that as a good sign.
The GIStiquette, seems to imply that there is almost always some copyright in the footer of the map.
Could this copyright be embedded in the documentation (à la MIT) and still comply?
But other people might disagree. There are even people that think the whole license is invalid and that it can be used as Public Domain, because the license is for creative work and not meant to be used for databases. This is the major reason OSM is changing to a different license right now (ODbL).
Edit: See here http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/Why_CC_BY-SA_is_Un...
;)
Do the down-mods represent people operating in good faith thinking I'm being mean-spirited, rude, and damaging the conversation? Or are they Apple fanboys upset by a little uncomfortable teasing at their expense? I can only speculate. :P
He is probably getting downvoted by people who
1) don't see it as sarcastic 2) Think it detracts from the conversation and encourages behavior of a similar sort.
While I'm agree with you that credits must be given where it is due, stretching it to the fact that this behavior would be in their DNA seems not backed up by facts in my point of view.
And think about it, everyone who they'd want to know that it is OSM, now knows :-P
This is great for OSM because it's starting to show how it's a real player, not just as as "open source map data", but "map data", i.e. it's competiting with the big, non-open source, map data providers now.
April 2010 is around when they would have started working on the maps back-end. Attribution would have meant dev releases would have indicated Apple using non-Google Maps data. They probably wanted to avoid that.
Some of the comments were implying that Apple didn't give credit because they have a culture that is insolent. I was just trying to give context to the decision.
eg. A business' address/phone number can't be copyrighted on its own, but a specific collection of them into a Yellow Pages can be.
It's not a big deal despite the 500 articles that have been written about it.
"...the selection or arrangement of data only results in a protected compilation if the end result qualifies as an original intellectual creation."
(This actually saved me in university when the school wanted to charge me with copyright violation after I scraped their job database to make it easier to work with.)
I got fed up with trying to use it, so I looked at the HTML and decided that it was easy enough to parse. I made the deliberate decision to link to the original job descriptions so that you'd still have to log in to find any real information about the jobs. However, a listing of {employer,job title,location} seemed harmless enough.
I wrote it such that it ran once and spat out a static HTML file so that it wouldn't be constantly accessing the original server. Then I hosted it on my university account and told people about it via Twitter. I had no intention of hiding it; I wanted it to help people! Also, I posted the scraping script (which required a university account to login before it could run) on GitHub for others to use or improve. Y'know.
A few days later, my account had been disabled! When I went to see the people in charge, they told me that I was violating their copyright and since I has posted my code to scrape, they considered me to be a malicious hacker. They also said that I could have single-handedly taken down the co-op program at the university.
For my formal response, I learned some obscure details about Canadian copyright law (like what I posted in the grandparent), and took the opportunity to educate the administrators on hacker culture (with the help of Eric Raymond). I also made sure to explain the implications of my script (runs only once, requires a login, links to the actual copyrighted works). Oh, and I used some of my connections with IT security and professors as character reference.
In the end, they decided to punish me for reproducing their data (which the login screen technically prohibits, but it's unrealistic- having the page in memory is a reproduction!) by making me take a business ethics course, which was actually a fun and interesting course. No criminal charges, no expulsion/suspension. I figured it wasn't too bad, though I would have appreciated an apology for essentially calling me a terrorist. ;)
The lesson I learned is to not try to make others' lives easier. :P I definitely won't shy away from scraping whatever data sources I can get my hands on, but I probably won't share the results with large groups of people.
OSM has its fair share of inconsistencies but it's not that bad.
The map is ok for what it is: Just for presentation inside of iPhoto, not for browsing or finding your way. I really hope that Apple doesn't plan to use this anywhere else and hat they just didn't go with Google because they can't customize their maps any way they want.
(That missing credit is also shameful. I was looking everywhere inside of iPhoto but couldn't find it. Stuff like that sould at least be moderately easy to find.)
That's funny. A German client of mine specifically asked me to put an OpenStreetMap map right next to the Google Map because the details of OpenStreetMap were more precise. The client creates POI geo coordinates and uses the maps to find the best position for a poi.
Apple's tiles, however have more glaring mistakes (double labels, missing labels).
Apple's tiles have all the streets but not a lot of detail (probably by choice, nothing wrong with a sparser map, especially for the intended purpose) and the labels suck.
http://cl.ly/133M1H3W2W362S2F0l13 http://cl.ly/2P2d3y042N1T0o2p390H
600k and 60k inhabitants respectively.
Is this a first sign that without an asshole with taste at the top, the erosion of Apple is inevitable?
Or, maybe Apple is going to quickly flame out.
My understanding is that Apple used the data from OSM to produce their own tiles, which, I believe, look much better than this.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/03/apple-begins-using...
In my town (Santa Barbara, CA) OSM looks decent - not as many details as GMaps, but more than some others...
That's very disappointing to hear. I understood that it was ever better than Google Maps in some parts of Europe.
Here's the dump: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/Planet.osm
The only thing that was missing in my city were a few house-numbers in some streets close to my apartment. So I went out and fixed it.
It also seems like they should be required to release all the styling parameters and/or code needed to render the maps exactly as they appear in iPhoto - does anyone know how far CC-BY-SA reaches in a case like this?
EDIT: for that last part, I guess they probably would be fine just releasing the whole thing pre-rendered.
See Feist V. Rural
"The constitutional requirement necessitates independent creation plus a modicum of creativity. Since facts do not owe their origin to an act of authorship, they are not original, and thus are not copyrightable. Although a compilation of facts may possess the requisite originality because the author typically chooses which facts to include, in what order to place them, and how to arrange the data so that readers may use them effectively, copyright protection extends only to those components of the work that are original to the author, not to the facts themselves. This fact/expression dichotomy severely limits the scope of protection in fact-based works."
Whether or not the street data is copyrightable in light of this decision is definitely sketchy; the tiles etc. clearly are since they have some modicum of creativity.
Apple have actually been using this tile set for a while (it's used in the slide show mode of the current version of iPhoto for OS X).
And yes, it looks like they've been using it for a while, no-one noticed till now.
What do you mean by that? This is all from software released today, right?
Where they have used it, they used it as hint as to where a photo was taken. The more detailed info panes still use google's maps.
The lack of given credit to OSM doesn't seems like an accident, and I was looking forward to see what Apple was doing with that amazing mapping technology from SAAB.
This is underwhelming to say the least, I was expecting much more from Apple.
Accident my ass! Incompetence, at best. If this was Microsoft or Oracle, not Apple, HN would be grabbing their pitchforks in three seconds.
An exaggeration on my part perhaps but when you compare the number of articles written about this compared to the Google contractors that intentionally sabotaged OSM data the difference is staggering.
As for the Google contractors, I remember that being a big story (especially coming on the heels of the Kenya incident) until Google fired them and apologized.
Similarly, I'd expect interest in Apple's failure to credit OSM to go away once they fix it and apologize. Apple's use of OSM is interesting on its own terms, of course, so I doubt interest in that will die down anytime soon.
Edit: They're apparently combining map data in some places.
Apple are not using OSM in USA (maybe canada, i dunno), but are definitly using it outside there.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/SRTM
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Shaded_relief_maps_using_...
But from a practical standpoint, the world is really really bog. "Generating map data" isn't exactly easy, you don't "generate it", you have to "collect it". This isn't like generating a spell checking dictionary, or a a user generated world for a video game. You have to use reality.
The half a million OSM users has been collecting this data for about 8 years now. Either with lots of GPSs or buy tracing satilite/aerial imagery from Yahoo and now Bing (not Google ☹).
To generate it yourself, you need to reproduce all of that above. Google's Street View is a way to reproduce it, since you'll have GPS traces of all the roads, and photos of what the road is like (for street names). OSM covers twice or more times what Google Street View does, so that won't even get you there.
The other option is to pay companies that have already done this, this is what Google Maps (et al.) mostly is, and is also what GPS/SatNav companies do. They get their data from either governmental sources if possible, or from tracing aerial imagery.
All those options are expensive. Why not just use that free OSM data?
This is why OSM was created. To provide a free source of map data to improve humanity.
After the announcement I read tweets that basically said Apple was still using the Google Maps service, but the tiles were rendered by Apple?
Based on what I'm reading it sounds like I misunderstood or am misremembering what I read.
The tiles use terrain data that nobody thinks is from OSM, and when I look at North American cities, the street grids certainly don't seem to match any better than you'd expect.
This post sounds pretty confident but they don't explain why.
"The new iPhoto for iOS, however, uses Apple’s own map tiles – made from OpenStreetMap data (outside the US)."
[1] http://alastaira.wordpress.com/2012/03/08/apple-maps-aka-app...
Hopefully, this signals apple will move away from google for the built in maps app and provide something superior themselves with something comparable to the kick ass turn by turn in the current Android devices.
http://alastaira.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/image3.png
http://alastaira.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/image4.png
Apple's version comes up really lacking in comparison to the default OSM one, which I would call gorgeous, personally.
That photo was taken in a park. In one of those maps that fact is abundantly clear. In the other it's not. Hell, in the apple map the trails look like roads. How on earth could anyone call that "clear"?