Comment by neomantra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neomantra | Hacker News Reader

I happened to be using OpenStreetMaps for the last couple weeks and released a Golang OpenAPI library for OpenChargeMap [1] In that, I released an IPython notebook and used that to visualize the data on Vision Pro [2].

And I did get it working! But it was not near as cool as it could be because of two dramatic events:

OSM Foundation violated the trust (nice way to put it) of a participant, OSMBuildings.org, in the search for sponsorship [3] (four years ago, such lost progress :( ) The other is that LeafletJS’s developer is Ukrainian and can’t advance his project [4].

Please consider those two issues when contemplating donating to OSM due to this press release. While I applaud OSM abstractly, it exists because of a massive amounts of public contributions of IP, not because of $$ from a commercial sponsor.

[1] https://github.com/neomantra/go-openchargemap [2] https://github.com/neomantra/go-openchargemap/blob/main/exam... [3] https://medium.com/@osmbuildings/why-were-not-going-to-suppo... [4] https://leafletjs.com/

It seems unlikely to me that the OSMF did something shady in exchange for the promise of 6,000 Euros from Cesium.

The OSM Buildings folks called themselves "OSM Buildings", using the OSM trademark. They offered a commercial service. The OSMF was OK with this. It seems the OSMF is OK with a lot of things -- including permitting Cesium to use the OSM mark in their own commercial project.

Live and let live, may a thousand flowers bloom, etc.

Rather than reflect on the fact that their name was not really theirs, but relied on the goodwill of the OSM mark, the OSM Buildings folks decided to ragequit and shut down their project, dramatically claiming that their name was "seized by a multimillion dollar company"?

The whole thing is bizarre to me.

I was trying to understand it from both sides and not getting much. Some of your color helps too (like the euro amounts). It all was bizarre and sadly the whole thing blocked some progress.

I had come back to temper my response because for sure this is great work by the tech team.

Some more colour is that the OSM Buildings project didn't even ask permission to use the OSM mark. If they were a community project, this was permissible. If they were a commercial project, they ought to have sought permission from the OSMF.

Given that, it seems pretty reasonable to me that the OSMF's stance was basically: your name is your problem, if you think someone is infringing on it, it's up to you to enforce it.

The OSMF runs on a shoestring budget - something like $400,000/year, vs Wikimedia Foundation, which runs on $170,000,000/year. It would be a real shame if a potential donor thought this particular instance was a reason not to donate to the OSMF.

Leaflet is a separate project from OpenStreetMap - it's just one popular frontend for viewing tiles served from openstreetmap.org, like OpenLayers.

I don't believe the OSM Foundation has ever been involved in Leaflet development, as Leaflet development was supported in the past by commercial vendors of OSM data like CloudMade and Mapbox.

Maybe faux pas to reply to my own comment I made further connections with this.

I literally had cloned and was fixing OSMBuildings.org because, among other things, it wasn't clamping values correctly [1] -- it's why my charging markers are white. But I felt conflicted doing that. I was happy with what I spiked with OSMBuildings and started exploring commercial services like MapBox and a few other OSS projects.

Operating projects and companies and organizations is not easy. It sucks what happened there. I'm not a hater and actually looked to Patreon or similar Paul Norman -- and maybe the 'vector tiles' earmark literally means that? But, I'm not happy with that previous behavior of the organization...

So it's great the OSM Vector Tile service will be dramatically improved...

If any of us start doing something interesting with, will we get jacked up like OSMBuildings? Is that the stewardship of this donations? That's the rub.

[1] https://github.com/OSMBuildings/OSMBuildings/issues/230

OSMF chairperson here. The osmbuildings situation is unfortunate. They never asked to use the trademark, didn’t participate in community discussions, and used OSM + a very generic term for their project name. Cesium asked for our permission to use the same words, and simultaneously, but not in exchange for any permission, joined as a member to support the foundation. That money went to paying for the infrastructure that runs the project.

We never asked osmbuildings to stop using the name. We’ve never granted exclusive trademark permission to anyone - if you wanted to launch a product called “neomantra OSM buildings”, we’d find it cool.

If you start an interesting project, pick a non-generic name.

In all honesty, I find 3D buildings such a gimmick anyway. I'd rather see a flat map with less clutter.

Seeing building heights is an important way of knowing which part of an unfamiliar city is the central/business district, or where hotels and malls vs office towers might be.

But it is a lot of data that's very hard to keep updated.

> LeafletJS’s developer is Ukrainian and can’t advance his project

Not sure what you mean by this?

Are you suggesting you can't support the project of a Ukrainian, or that the Ukrainian developer is unable to support their own project due to the war? Keeping in mind that Leaflet is a well established, open source project with any number of maintainers / contributors and (while no doubt an impossible time for a family from Kyiv) @mourner's contribution graph [1] remains remarkably healthy.

[1] https://github.com/mourner

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