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OpenStreetMap May be in Serious Trouble

posted by martyb on Wednesday February 21 2018, @01:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the uncharted-territory dept.

islisis writes:

Serge Wroclawski, a long-time contributor to OpenStreetMap, has posted a criticism of the management choices he believes are preventing the OpenStreetMap Foundation from fulfilling its mission (much like the Wikimedia Foundation):

I feel the OpenStreetMap project is currently unable to fulfill that mission due to poor technical decisions, poor political decisions, and a general malaise in the project. I'm going to outline in this article what I think OpenStreetMap has gotten wrong. It's entirely possible that OSM will reform and address the impediments to its success- and I hope it does. We need a Free as in Freedom geographic dataset.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2018, @05:33PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2018, @05:33PM (#641268)

    ...Google Maps badly needs a style update.

    Yeah, google should make it all flat looking and hard to use like their other products.

  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday February 21 2018, @06:42PM (1 child)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday February 21 2018, @06:42PM (#641309)

    Have you tried Bing Maps? It's actually attractive.

    Yeah, their OS looks like total shit with that "Metro" interface and all, and really looks rather garish IMO, but Bing Maps isn't like that.

    Now this doesn't mean that Bing Maps is actually more useful or functional or has better data, I'm just commenting on the aesthetics. I just looked at my local area on it (I don't normally use it), and while it's prettier than Google Maps, it's missing a bunch of details, such as a nearby rail-trail, a nature preserve, various businesses, etc.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by damnbunni on Wednesday February 21 2018, @11:12PM

      by damnbunni (704) on Wednesday February 21 2018, @11:12PM (#641491) Journal

      The worst part about Bing Maps is that it killed Microsoft Streets and Trips.

      S&T was a much more complex program with a lot of features most people would never need, but if you needed them, now you're just hosed.

      Since Garmin bought Delorme and killed Street Atlas, the only real alternative now is something like Maptitude which certainly does the job, but it's $700.