Personal take of a longtime OSM contributor: I don't think it's an issue and welcome any improvements from any directions. I also don't care if megacorps use the data to make jillions of dollars and never contribute. But I know others feel differently.
If someone manages to take over OSM and put a restrictive license on the data, we'll just fork from the last open version and keep on doing what we do best: we map!
Bless you for being robust. This is the spirit that will save humanity from regulatory spider webs, and produce some fantastic things long into the future.
The article is a blurry overworded FUD, because fear get more clicks (yes, I clicked too), and Bloomberg probably pays/evaluates by length. There's no clear issue mentioned with corp contributions, just what-if-something-maybe stuff.
As far as licences go, though, the terms and conditions regulating usage of OpenStreetMap now fill not three documents, but three SECTIONS on the OpenStreetMap Foundation's wiki. However liberal these licences may be, for the money it would cost me to hire a lawyer to read through them, I could just buy access to a commercial service.
> I also don't care if megacorps use the data to make jillions of dollars and never contribute
I can see you've received lots of praise for your commitment to open source, your passion about mapping, your contribution to the world. Regardless, the above statement just seems sad and depressing, the acknowledgement and resignation.
It's arguing that corporations are contributing data to OSM, but that this somehow... changes the proportion of what kinds of things OSM covers? That traditional users have added "hyperlocal features, such as a neighborhood bench or informal walking path" while coporations are adding "roads, buildings, and all other points of interest" and "a particular emphasis on improving road data".
How is this anything but good? As long as data is correct, the more data the better -- proportions are meaningless. Buildings and roads aren't taking away from benches and paths. And I'm pretty sure buildings and roads are benefiting all users anyways, no matter who contributes them.
I'm utterly baffled by what logic the author imagines this is a bad thing. The data is open, so it's not like corporations are winding up with exclusive ownership of anything.
One of the typical ways this manifests itself in reality is a dedicated local mapper adding or correcting a detail where they know that some common data sources are either wrong or out of date. At some point later a corporate mapper the other side of the planet working from imagery will come along and change it back to agree with the imagery they have, despite it being 4 years old. Local mappers get exhausted from the effort it takes to keep their patch from being broken and disenfranchised with their edits being drowned out by the noise of the corporate machine.
A devils advocate answer of course, I'm personally on the fence on the issue.
I think the concern is big companies might get into governing positions and make decisions about the projects future... For example, they could decide to divert some efforts into a commercially licensed 'extended' dataset, or they could sign restrictive deals to get hold of 3d laser scan or satellite/aerial imagery that isn't so easy for volunteers to collect.
For me this discussion is new, so I don't have good answers to these questions.
One thing that happened when Pokemon Go got popular is that people (users) were conducting vandalism, in the sense that many pokemon figures were added to the main map of OSM. People have to work really hard to remove these, and they might burn out on this. There is already a lot of vandalism, like people adding their friends drinking shed, or whatever they think of as funny.
Another thing that already happens with volunteers, is people thinking their working area is "their area", while no such concept exists. This can already give a lot of friction among volunteers. I can imagine if billions in money are at stake, big companies with a massive crowd of emplyees might want to really grab those working areas and drown out volunteers. If that gets a big problem, volunteers that were active for years might drop out.
OSM contributor here: agreed with you, not sure what they're on about. All the sources are also old and known, with the newest references to the latest State of the Map conference. It's a long article with a lot of random historic fun facts, but I don't quite get the point.
> When it launched in the mid-2000s, most spatial information was owned by governments, and was difficult or impossible to access.
It bothers me that this sentence is used as if the facts behind it are a logical arrangement of consequences. The fact that people are prevented from accessing data that they funded, and by all rights own, is an absurdity.
I appreciate that OSM exists, but in a perfect world, it shouldn't have to.
I am very pleased that corporations are helping us with the map. It can sometimes be annoying when somebody who isn't from the area messes some complicated intersection based on old satellite imagery. It is awesome when a corporation adds large numbers of features that I never would have added. More contributions is a net positive.
The only concern I have is that corporations may seek to prevent OSMF from offering competing map services. Mapbox might, for example, seek to hamstring the openstreetmap.org tile server in order to push people to their commercial offering. This is largely theoretical but is a large concern of mine. As long as core technologies are Free/Open Source, we can always pack up and fork if it becomes problematic.
The Crux of the article I feel: Open Street Maps (OSM) is free and the rest largely aren’t. Conversely the cost of things like Google Maps (as a service not as a consumer in this context) has risen dramatically so naturally big companies are turning to the free offering more and more and the worry is they will have outsized impact in the project and become the dominant body and their priorities will be pushed forward over others
And not a whiff that they are contributing back in substantial ways on the whole either
Seems like all giant corporations are one way or another not respecting the spirit of the mission of the organization and often aren’t receptive to community feedback in any substantial way
Edit: maybe leeches (that was my previous statement) is harsh, however I stand by my assertion that the spirit of the project isn’t being taken into consideration in this instance. Whenever FaceBook, Apple etc can make it proprietary they will rather than share data and compete on things like user experience. They could do much better in this regard. I don’t believe personally that it’s the developers at that company per se that are the issue this is an issue with industry politics and open source policies etc.
But they are contributing back, that's the point of the article right?
So much so the article is more about who controls the organisation.
I personally see this mostly as a good thing. More data, better data, and everyone gets value out of it: users and corporations. Surely it's a sign this project is doing things right.
However I think it's right that the article points at the power structure of this organisation, I think now more than ever it's important it remains independent.
> And not a whiff that they are contributing back in substantial ways on the whole either
How have you achieved this conclusion when the entire article is about how corporations are contributing back, and the fear that those contributions might cause the devaluation of volunteer contributions? There’s even half a dozen visualisations to demonstrate the extent of their contributions.
>Conversely the cost of things like Google Maps (as a service not as a consumer in this context) has risen dramatically so naturally big companies are turning to the free offering more and more and the worry is they will have outsized impact in the project and become the dominant body and their priorities will be pushed forward over others
I don't know if this has changed with newer versions of the google maps API, but years ago when I had the choice of using google maps or OSM, the biggest motivator in my decision, when OSM was still a lot less complete, was to do with Google's licensing.
There was a clause that implied they'd have some rights to reproduce and use our data and that was totally unacceptable for our use case. OSM was completely free to use without worries that google was somehow going to be able to use our data in some way.
Trying to piece together what the actual concerns are:
* Mapping is not purely factual, some things can be mapped in different ways and corporations might map things that conflict with how normal people see them. Maybe an example would be deleting a commonly used path through cooperate headquarters that was made for staff/visitors.
* Too much data in niche areas like driveways overwork volunteers and steers attention away from citizen areas of work
* Governance model, fears corporations will get too much control through sponsorships
I see these as valid issues but I think they can be worked through. For me it has been extremely nice to have a free and open data source for projects and the OSM data model is really easy to use I think. I feel the benefits outweigh the problems but I am only a user looking from the outside.
As a long-time OSM contributor, 1 is the only one that bothers me.
We've had a bit of an issue in the UK with Amazon Logistics mappers blatting away some of the nuance in rights-of-way mapping (which is quite a complex subject in UK law) as they map driveways for their own use.
That's not a massive problem in itself - OSM has reasonably good communication mechanisms (particularly changeset comments), and there's a clear Organised Edit Policy which most of the big guys follow. It's just a challenge because of scale: it's hard for part-time, unpaid volunteers to spend hours chasing after the countless Amazon contractors who are sitting editing OSM all day. I know we've lost a few individual contributors because of this, though more in the US than in Europe.
But this is mostly growing pains. With goodwill from all sides I don't see any reason it won't be resolved.
OSM has a rather straightforward way of mapping things: if it's there, we map it. If the USA claims to own Poland, then we do nothing. If the USA actually occupies parts of Poland, then we change the tags to reflect that reality. Not to indicate that they own it, perhaps, but at least to indicate that it's stably under their control. Conflicts (I'm a moderator in an OSM chat, it can get very heated) mostly arise from people who don't like reality and want it to be shown differently. But their issue is with the renderer, e.g. OsmAnd, for showing it as belonging to what they perceive to be really theirs and unfairly occupied. But that doesn't change what the underlying data should show: reality. I'm having a hard time thinking of what would create a true conflict without clear solution.
Of companies mentioned in the article, the asymmetric contributions to OSM that bother me the most are AllTrails and Strava - 2 companies that heavily rely on trail data sourced from OSM.
AllTrails does close to zilch to help put trails into the maps, even though the majority of trails are user-generated content.
Strava has let "Slide", their one project that could help put trails on the map, die an ungracious death.
If you build a whole business model on top of free data, it may be worth considering improving that data.
Strava worked with Mapbox when they were switching over. I don't know what exactly the deal was, but Mapbox employees added a bunch of missing stuff to OSM based on Strava data analysis.
but I do find this whole discussion strange, because it's rather obviously the same problem that open-source _anything_ has: you're giving something away for free, and it's very hard if not impossible to control how that data gets used or whether the primary benefactors contribute back anything to the source.
Ironically, the only known model of forcing people/corporations to contribute something back based on their usage of something is called "market-based pricing".
Unless someone is proposing that maps are somehow ethically or systematically different, than, say, Linux, this conversation feels rather unspecific and pointless.
There's a similar problem with websites which map rock climbing routes. Some make their data open to some extent, but not in a way that can be meaningfully contributed back to OSM. Even though they all use OSM data (usually via Mapbox), to generate their maps, and allow users to draw and annotate layers on top of it.
I'm very interested in working towards an open tooling and open data ecosystem for rock climbing information, but I don't know where to get started on finding others to build it with.
Does strava actually use the trail data from OSM? as far as i can tell, the routes on strava are entirely contributed by strava users and don't come from OSM in any way.
The two maps follow the same paths obviously, but at least in my region the routes and segments on strava don't ever seem to start or stop at the trail intersections in the OSM maps and often cross unmapped and unofficial connectors that don't appear on OSM. The extent of their reliance on OSM trail data seems to be that they use MapBox tile images and those tiles sometimes have OSM trail names marked on them.
I work in geospatial stuff and we use OSM data. There's things I'd contribute back but the community is notoriously prickly. You make a couple of mistakes not made out of malice and they'll assume you're corpos out to fuck everyone because that's what evil corpos do.
The downside is high (you get a bad reputation as being an evil corpo) and the upside is limited. So, for the moment, we just hold the corrections on our side and overlay them on top.
If you're an actual corp you don't care about that, but being labeled an evil corpo will ruin things if you want to cooperate. And we're a small startup.
I'll revisit it some time but we're being cautious about it.
I don’t want to reinforce your feeling (I can imagine exactly the pain you’re talking about) but isn’t there a legal requirement for map corrections to be published? They don’t have to go back into OSM, but they do have to be made available because of the share—a-like concept of the license. At least, I thought so.
I've read the whole article and I don't get what its trying to say. Corpos are not contributing enough? They are contributing too much and thats changing the culture?
There's a fairly large number of long time contributors to OpenStreetMap that only want driveways if they are added with deep passion (I'm like ⅔ serious).
There is a real issue where it doesn't make sense for a small volunteer organization to manage a massive amount of data that is not of interest to a broader set of users. It's not a huge issue, because the narrow interests mostly understand the basic issue, there's just not universal agreement about what is broadly useful or not.
I had the same impression. Amazon moved into our area and someone from their logistics has been contributing a lot to OSM mostly documenting service roads. They have the resources to really add to level of detail of OSM. I see it as a net positive.
"Such devaluation could lead to what he called “digital gentrification,” in which the very attributes of OSM that drew its earlier users are degraded by its newfound fame."
A look at much of the internet and the declining role of academic guiding principles wrt technology and its governance tells you where this might be headed..
Hope OSM somehow can find a golden middle way that incorporates "grassroots"/cute data like benches as well as large-scale and tedious to maintain data such as roads or road signs. Don't let 'em eat you.
This article seems to take the absurd position that these companies contributing to OSM are making it worse. One can only imagine the article written in the alternate universe where Apple et.all used the data but didn’t contribute their improvements back - any chance at all it would be a positive one?
Am I reading this correctly that some volunteers are upset that their edits represent a smaller proportion of total edits because big companies are adding lots of data? But in absolute numbers the volunteer edits are still the same?
If that’s the case, is that essentially asking for a map with less data so their own contribution can be a bigger fraction of the total data?
I thought they were talking about wikimapia.org, still upset that Google hasn't offered them a free API key or something like that, that project is awesome. Among other things it was one of the best ways to follow the Syrian Civil War, at the beginning, at least.
The wikimapia.org isn't bigger is really a shame. That site is like a treasure.
To be fair, how interesting it can be totally depends on the community of your city. The place I used to live seem to have one or two people that are very passionate, almost all the buildings are marked and often have interesting tidbits and trivia attached to them. I used to spend hours reading it. The city I currently live, on the contrary, is relatively dry in that regard. Still useful, but not something I can binge-read on.
On the technical side though, I feel like they're always lacking even before the whole GMaps API thing. It has so many bugs (and site is slow), to a point that viewing or editing become annoying from time to time.
It seems rude to mention Strava in conjunction with withholding data in this way as I'm fairly sure they have helped to contribute back anonymized gps traces to the community for tracing of biking and hiking routes.
Similar to BSD licence, this is beyond their legal requirement and is some kind of token of good faith in what seems a mutually beneficial relationship. I'm sure they could do more and it's an open question on how to get those that benefit most to contribute in similar proportion but I'd think there must be better targets to call out.
I understand the potential nightmare scenarios that the author describes, because the author is worried about the sheer amount of "editing capabilities" of a company compared to a small community of OSM editors.
But doesn't that automatically imply that the current way of verifying OSM data is flawed and needs a better architecture?
Setting aside my personal opinions about feasibility... I think that this is actually a valid use case for a proof-of-map based system that removes the statistical power of a company with too many (maybe unintended) potentially malicious editors.
Corporations have a broad set of methods to defend themselves from bad actors. They also have money to set them up, or influence own direction.
It is an interesting question how open project should defend against such actions. Without money and without a law protecting them.
As an enthusiast of open source movement especially, it is worrying that such projects are easy targets for wrongdoing. Examples of such actions could could fill a book or two. This is happening for years.
[+] [-] beej71|5 years ago|reply
If someone manages to take over OSM and put a restrictive license on the data, we'll just fork from the last open version and keep on doing what we do best: we map!
[+] [-] kylegill|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goatcode|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codezero|5 years ago|reply
It’s awesome to know you’re also passionate about OSM.
[+] [-] brokenkebab|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tinus_hn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rounin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] listenallyall|5 years ago|reply
I can see you've received lots of praise for your commitment to open source, your passion about mapping, your contribution to the world. Regardless, the above statement just seems sad and depressing, the acknowledgement and resignation.
[+] [-] crazygringo|5 years ago|reply
It's arguing that corporations are contributing data to OSM, but that this somehow... changes the proportion of what kinds of things OSM covers? That traditional users have added "hyperlocal features, such as a neighborhood bench or informal walking path" while coporations are adding "roads, buildings, and all other points of interest" and "a particular emphasis on improving road data".
How is this anything but good? As long as data is correct, the more data the better -- proportions are meaningless. Buildings and roads aren't taking away from benches and paths. And I'm pretty sure buildings and roads are benefiting all users anyways, no matter who contributes them.
I'm utterly baffled by what logic the author imagines this is a bad thing. The data is open, so it's not like corporations are winding up with exclusive ownership of anything.
So what's the problem...?
[+] [-] ris|5 years ago|reply
A devils advocate answer of course, I'm personally on the fence on the issue.
[+] [-] londons_explore|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mpol|5 years ago|reply
One thing that happened when Pokemon Go got popular is that people (users) were conducting vandalism, in the sense that many pokemon figures were added to the main map of OSM. People have to work really hard to remove these, and they might burn out on this. There is already a lot of vandalism, like people adding their friends drinking shed, or whatever they think of as funny.
Another thing that already happens with volunteers, is people thinking their working area is "their area", while no such concept exists. This can already give a lot of friction among volunteers. I can imagine if billions in money are at stake, big companies with a massive crowd of emplyees might want to really grab those working areas and drown out volunteers. If that gets a big problem, volunteers that were active for years might drop out.
[+] [-] lucb1e|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petre|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akira2501|5 years ago|reply
It bothers me that this sentence is used as if the facts behind it are a logical arrangement of consequences. The fact that people are prevented from accessing data that they funded, and by all rights own, is an absurdity.
I appreciate that OSM exists, but in a perfect world, it shouldn't have to.
[+] [-] blendergeek|5 years ago|reply
I am very pleased that corporations are helping us with the map. It can sometimes be annoying when somebody who isn't from the area messes some complicated intersection based on old satellite imagery. It is awesome when a corporation adds large numbers of features that I never would have added. More contributions is a net positive.
The only concern I have is that corporations may seek to prevent OSMF from offering competing map services. Mapbox might, for example, seek to hamstring the openstreetmap.org tile server in order to push people to their commercial offering. This is largely theoretical but is a large concern of mine. As long as core technologies are Free/Open Source, we can always pack up and fork if it becomes problematic.
[+] [-] no_wizard|5 years ago|reply
And not a whiff that they are contributing back in substantial ways on the whole either
Seems like all giant corporations are one way or another not respecting the spirit of the mission of the organization and often aren’t receptive to community feedback in any substantial way
Edit: maybe leeches (that was my previous statement) is harsh, however I stand by my assertion that the spirit of the project isn’t being taken into consideration in this instance. Whenever FaceBook, Apple etc can make it proprietary they will rather than share data and compete on things like user experience. They could do much better in this regard. I don’t believe personally that it’s the developers at that company per se that are the issue this is an issue with industry politics and open source policies etc.
[+] [-] alex_duf|5 years ago|reply
So much so the article is more about who controls the organisation.
I personally see this mostly as a good thing. More data, better data, and everyone gets value out of it: users and corporations. Surely it's a sign this project is doing things right.
However I think it's right that the article points at the power structure of this organisation, I think now more than ever it's important it remains independent.
[+] [-] avianlyric|5 years ago|reply
How have you achieved this conclusion when the entire article is about how corporations are contributing back, and the fear that those contributions might cause the devaluation of volunteer contributions? There’s even half a dozen visualisations to demonstrate the extent of their contributions.
[+] [-] grawprog|5 years ago|reply
I don't know if this has changed with newer versions of the google maps API, but years ago when I had the choice of using google maps or OSM, the biggest motivator in my decision, when OSM was still a lot less complete, was to do with Google's licensing.
There was a clause that implied they'd have some rights to reproduce and use our data and that was totally unacceptable for our use case. OSM was completely free to use without worries that google was somehow going to be able to use our data in some way.
[+] [-] asperous|5 years ago|reply
* Mapping is not purely factual, some things can be mapped in different ways and corporations might map things that conflict with how normal people see them. Maybe an example would be deleting a commonly used path through cooperate headquarters that was made for staff/visitors.
* Too much data in niche areas like driveways overwork volunteers and steers attention away from citizen areas of work
* Governance model, fears corporations will get too much control through sponsorships
I see these as valid issues but I think they can be worked through. For me it has been extremely nice to have a free and open data source for projects and the OSM data model is really easy to use I think. I feel the benefits outweigh the problems but I am only a user looking from the outside.
[+] [-] Doctor_Fegg|5 years ago|reply
We've had a bit of an issue in the UK with Amazon Logistics mappers blatting away some of the nuance in rights-of-way mapping (which is quite a complex subject in UK law) as they map driveways for their own use.
That's not a massive problem in itself - OSM has reasonably good communication mechanisms (particularly changeset comments), and there's a clear Organised Edit Policy which most of the big guys follow. It's just a challenge because of scale: it's hard for part-time, unpaid volunteers to spend hours chasing after the countless Amazon contractors who are sitting editing OSM all day. I know we've lost a few individual contributors because of this, though more in the US than in Europe.
But this is mostly growing pains. With goodwill from all sides I don't see any reason it won't be resolved.
[+] [-] lucb1e|5 years ago|reply
> deleting a commonly used path through cooperate headquarters that was made for staff/visitors
That would be vandalism. The correct action is adding the tag:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag%3Aaccess%3DprivateOSM has a rather straightforward way of mapping things: if it's there, we map it. If the USA claims to own Poland, then we do nothing. If the USA actually occupies parts of Poland, then we change the tags to reflect that reality. Not to indicate that they own it, perhaps, but at least to indicate that it's stably under their control. Conflicts (I'm a moderator in an OSM chat, it can get very heated) mostly arise from people who don't like reality and want it to be shown differently. But their issue is with the renderer, e.g. OsmAnd, for showing it as belonging to what they perceive to be really theirs and unfairly occupied. But that doesn't change what the underlying data should show: reality. I'm having a hard time thinking of what would create a true conflict without clear solution.
[+] [-] fennecfoxen|5 years ago|reply
I cannot believe that this example represents a meaningful source of conflict.
[+] [-] samaparicio|5 years ago|reply
AllTrails does close to zilch to help put trails into the maps, even though the majority of trails are user-generated content.
Strava has let "Slide", their one project that could help put trails on the map, die an ungracious death.
If you build a whole business model on top of free data, it may be worth considering improving that data.
[+] [-] maxerickson|5 years ago|reply
https://github.com/mapbox/mapping/issues/114
[+] [-] ledauphin|5 years ago|reply
but I do find this whole discussion strange, because it's rather obviously the same problem that open-source _anything_ has: you're giving something away for free, and it's very hard if not impossible to control how that data gets used or whether the primary benefactors contribute back anything to the source.
Ironically, the only known model of forcing people/corporations to contribute something back based on their usage of something is called "market-based pricing".
Unless someone is proposing that maps are somehow ethically or systematically different, than, say, Linux, this conversation feels rather unspecific and pointless.
[+] [-] hmsimha|5 years ago|reply
I'm very interested in working towards an open tooling and open data ecosystem for rock climbing information, but I don't know where to get started on finding others to build it with.
[+] [-] notatoad|5 years ago|reply
The two maps follow the same paths obviously, but at least in my region the routes and segments on strava don't ever seem to start or stop at the trail intersections in the OSM maps and often cross unmapped and unofficial connectors that don't appear on OSM. The extent of their reliance on OSM trail data seems to be that they use MapBox tile images and those tiles sometimes have OSM trail names marked on them.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] renewiltord|5 years ago|reply
The downside is high (you get a bad reputation as being an evil corpo) and the upside is limited. So, for the moment, we just hold the corrections on our side and overlay them on top.
If you're an actual corp you don't care about that, but being labeled an evil corpo will ruin things if you want to cooperate. And we're a small startup.
I'll revisit it some time but we're being cautious about it.
[+] [-] Brakenshire|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|5 years ago|reply
I guess you could still get criticized for not fixing them yourselves though.
[+] [-] tux1968|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aero-glide2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|5 years ago|reply
There is a real issue where it doesn't make sense for a small volunteer organization to manage a massive amount of data that is not of interest to a broader set of users. It's not a huge issue, because the narrow interests mostly understand the basic issue, there's just not universal agreement about what is broadly useful or not.
[+] [-] sevenf0ur|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RGamma|5 years ago|reply
A look at much of the internet and the declining role of academic guiding principles wrt technology and its governance tells you where this might be headed..
Hope OSM somehow can find a golden middle way that incorporates "grassroots"/cute data like benches as well as large-scale and tedious to maintain data such as roads or road signs. Don't let 'em eat you.
[+] [-] djrogers|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ris|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kgin|5 years ago|reply
If that’s the case, is that essentially asking for a map with less data so their own contribution can be a bigger fraction of the total data?
[+] [-] neonate|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paganel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fireattack|5 years ago|reply
To be fair, how interesting it can be totally depends on the community of your city. The place I used to live seem to have one or two people that are very passionate, almost all the buildings are marked and often have interesting tidbits and trivia attached to them. I used to spend hours reading it. The city I currently live, on the contrary, is relatively dry in that regard. Still useful, but not something I can binge-read on.
On the technical side though, I feel like they're always lacking even before the whole GMaps API thing. It has so many bugs (and site is slow), to a point that viewing or editing become annoying from time to time.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|5 years ago|reply
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Strava
Similar to BSD licence, this is beyond their legal requirement and is some kind of token of good faith in what seems a mutually beneficial relationship. I'm sure they could do more and it's an open question on how to get those that benefit most to contribute in similar proportion but I'd think there must be better targets to call out.
[+] [-] cookiengineer|5 years ago|reply
But doesn't that automatically imply that the current way of verifying OSM data is flawed and needs a better architecture?
Setting aside my personal opinions about feasibility... I think that this is actually a valid use case for a proof-of-map based system that removes the statistical power of a company with too many (maybe unintended) potentially malicious editors.
[+] [-] airstrike|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomaszs|5 years ago|reply
It is an interesting question how open project should defend against such actions. Without money and without a law protecting them.
As an enthusiast of open source movement especially, it is worrying that such projects are easy targets for wrongdoing. Examples of such actions could could fill a book or two. This is happening for years.
[+] [-] grapecookie|5 years ago|reply