Comment by nakedrobot2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nakedrobot2 | Hacker News Reader

I went to a State of the Map conference in Antwerp last year. For me it was fascinating, and not my normal type of crowd. A couple of things stuck out to me though.

It reminded me of the saying about libertarians: "Libertarians are like house cats. Completely dependent on a system they neither understand nor appreciate and fiercely confident of their own independence."

I love everything about openstreetmap, but it is completely dependent on the charity of Microsoft who donates the aerial/satellite images, which cost them millions. Without these images, there just would not be any openstreetmap at all. So while I appreciate the fiercely independent attitude of a lot of the OSM community, I also saw a lot of self-deception about how very dependent they are on these very large corporations, without whom they would have no source of data from which to make these maps.

First OSM existed and was already quite good many years before we got access to Bing imagery (2010). Undoubtedly there was a big boost in some types of mapping due to a reasonable quality global imagery source being available, mainly buildings, but it isn't as if we couldn't have continued without it.

Since then a lot of things have changed and the global imagery layers (currently Bing, ESRI and mapbox, all three using Maxar for a significant part) are, in developed parts of the world, mainly just used as a lesser quality fallback. As an example where I'm making right now, I'm using state level, a federal and a global (non-Bing) imagery.

Depends where you go. Around here the local government provides aerial imagery as a public service and it’s higher quality than Microsoft’s.

A nearby city recently began using OSM in its GIS services and bootstrapped the new arrangement by collaborating with local OSM volunteers to import previously inaccessible data into OSM.

Implementing open data projects through government is completely in line with the goals of OSM.

While true that Yahoo and then Bing has been important there are many other free sources of satellite imagery now days. OSM did not have access to imagery for quite a few years, so it possible without them, and also quite a lot more fun.

There are other providers, like Mapbox and Esri, not to mention local governments. There's a dependence, but not critical.

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