You are being too cynical. There's a lot of data outside of open streetmap that complements open streetmap. A lot of that data is open but hard to combine with openstreet maps. And some of that data is owned by companies that are willing to license the data in an open way.
Overture basically is a joint effort by several companies to combine all that data.
Speaking as someone who has worked with OSM data. It's great for maps but severely lacking elsewhere with a lot of incomplete data, poorly/inconsistently tagged data, lot's of regional variation in tagging, etc. All this presents challenges for users of this data wanting to build stuff on top of this data. And there are lots of companies that are replicating efforts to fix this between each other. Been there done that. This is hard, non trivial work.
Overture is an attempt to move on from lots of companies reinventing this wheel to get to a state where there is a decent data foundation to build their applications on.
And they are releasing that data under an open license. So, there's a lot to like here. The process of how this data is produced is not as open unfortunately and it is unfortunate that they are doing this outside of the openstreetmap community.
But then perhaps that community wasn't that welcoming to get such a thing done? Nor have they seem capable or willing to do such work themselves. Overture are clearly working around them and it's worth spending some time reflecting on whether that could have worked differently and what would have had to change on both sides for that to happen.
it seems to be making new map data under a permissive licence instead of openstreetmap's copyleft one, which makes it possible to coopt the work of volunteers
Looks like the only permissively licensed part is the "Places" dataset provided by Meta and Microsoft https://docs.overturemaps.org/release-notes/data-attribution... so the volunteers being coopted are e.g. people who made a Facebook page for their business?
jillesvangurp|1 year ago
Overture basically is a joint effort by several companies to combine all that data.
Speaking as someone who has worked with OSM data. It's great for maps but severely lacking elsewhere with a lot of incomplete data, poorly/inconsistently tagged data, lot's of regional variation in tagging, etc. All this presents challenges for users of this data wanting to build stuff on top of this data. And there are lots of companies that are replicating efforts to fix this between each other. Been there done that. This is hard, non trivial work.
Overture is an attempt to move on from lots of companies reinventing this wheel to get to a state where there is a decent data foundation to build their applications on.
And they are releasing that data under an open license. So, there's a lot to like here. The process of how this data is produced is not as open unfortunately and it is unfortunate that they are doing this outside of the openstreetmap community.
But then perhaps that community wasn't that welcoming to get such a thing done? Nor have they seem capable or willing to do such work themselves. Overture are clearly working around them and it's worth spending some time reflecting on whether that could have worked differently and what would have had to change on both sides for that to happen.
mistrial9|1 year ago
troupo|1 year ago
SideburnsOfDoom|1 year ago
We can, we have. So are they ignoring OpenStreetMap?
spencerflem|1 year ago
it seems to be making new map data under a permissive licence instead of openstreetmap's copyleft one, which makes it possible to coopt the work of volunteers
yorwba|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
RicoElectrico|1 year ago
biggestfan|1 year ago