Mapillary in the OpenStreetMap iD Editor | Hacker News Reader

Mapillary in the OpenStreetMap iD Editor

blog.mapillary.com

142 pointspetern24 comments

Note that Mapillary has some downsides. In addition to the CC-BY-SA license, the Mapillary T&C (http://www.mapillary.com/terms.html 1.3) give them the specific right to reuse user content as they wish, without attribution. (This is different from OSM, which uses the ODbL.)

Also, even though the license is CC-BY-SA, section 1.2 of the T&C prohibits commercial use. Further, I see no data dumps provided (or statement of intent to provide some eventually), unlike OSM, StackExchange, Wikimedia projects.

Last, the smartphone app seems to be closed-source. (If it is open-source, I couldn't find the source.)

It is great news that people are trying to develop a Google Street View replacement, but OSM's will to let people use this data to improve OSM (like they do for Bing satellite imagery) doesn't imply that this project is as free as OSM.

Either it's CC-BY-SA or it isn't. Maybe someone from Mapillary could comment.

Maybe the relevant section is left over from the previous license, which was CC-BY-NC (http://blog.mapillary.com/update/2014/03/17/mapillary-goes-c...). Alternatively, IANAL but I imagine that the individual photos could still be CC-BY-SA (if, e.g., someone else redistributes them) but that the service itself cannot be used for commercial purposes. As bulk exports are prohibited (2.1) and dumps are not provided, however, this would mean that the data is CC-BY-SA in theory but hard to reuse commercially except for individual pictures.

The crucial information is the lat/long of each photo. If that's not licensed openly (and, as metadata, CC0 or ODbL would be better suited than CC-BY-SA) then it's just a nice collection of photos.

Exactly. I can't see me contributing to this if I can't be sure I'll be able to get all the pictures with all their metadata. There have been enough services built thanks to user contributions that closed their data later on. I think we deserve guarantees that this isn't going to happen.

The images are indeed CC-BY-SA. Mapillary has an API / Apps etc which could be restricted under the terms they have published. The use of the services can be seen as being different from the image data.

e.g. Business plans: http://www.mapillary.com/business.html "The commercial plans only regulate the use of the APIs, the photos are still under Creative Commons."

So "you can use these images freely, but you have to first acquire them through our API, which you may not use quite freely," or am I missing something? This doesn't seem to make much sense.

Is it like Disneyland, where you pay at the gate and then enjoy whatever attractions you like? Or an all-you-can-eat buffet.

To clarify: * Outgoing license is CC-BY-SA. "Mapillary Photos are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0)." from http://www.mapillary.com/legal.html * OSM has an explicit right to take data under their contributor terms http://www.mapillary.com/osm.html * The incoming license is per Mapillary ToS because we want to be able to use the photos for 3D/street view/recognition/etc

Also we do give attribution to photographers under every single photo.

(I'm on the Mapillary team)

I would like to archive your photo collection for safe keeping at archive.org in the winter. Would you be up to work together on that or should I just write me some scripts and go at it (with reasonable rate limiting)?

Are original files available or is thumb-2048.jpg the maximum public quality?

Are there really no location tags in the files? If so, your CC license is pretty much worthless as the images itself are not useful to anyone. :(

Let's figure something out together. Email us.

Will do when the time has come. Thanks!

The tracks with the location data may be used without special conditions: http://www.mapillary.com/osm.html

> Either it's CC-BY-SA or it isn't.

Or it's dual-licenced... As I read the comment you are responding to, one could pick the license they like. If they pick CC-BY-SA, then they will have to share-alike and provide attribution, but it's allowed in commercial projects. If they want to use it in a non-commercial project, then they can use the T&C license and don't need to provide attribution.

I am not a lawyer, but I've seen dual-licensed projects before. Please do correct me if I'm wrong about this though.

Misleading title.

openstreetmap.org doesn't have a Street View function. Mapillary has been integrated into the default _editor_ (the wonderful iD) as an aid to mapping. It's not exposed to non-editing users.

Sorry, that is totally right. It's about the iD editor, nothing else.

For those who don't know, Mapillary is attempting to be an open source, crowd sourced equivalent of Google Street View. You can download the app on your phone and do some street view today.

Oh, wow. I wouldn't have known that from the blog post at all. That's awesome. An app is the perfect delivery mechanism for this.

For varying amounts of "open source".

Street view is a ton of data and uses custom hardware, and seems to be done in a fairly systematic way in order to cover most of an area.

So they've got their work cut out for them. That said, at one point I wasn't that optimistic about open street map either, and all of a sudden it seems like they now have very good data - at least where I live.

Just installed it on my WP, and I'm really glad there's an app available (most neglected platform).

Congrats to Mapillary for becoming the default street view. I hope to help in my neck of the woods!

The WM app is contributed by Tommy Ovesen one of the Norway Mapillary members, see http://blog.mapillary.com/update/2014/05/15/windows-phone-re...

Well done Jan Erik and team!

Nice pie menus!

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