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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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OpenStreetMap May be in Serious Trouble
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It's not reality that's important, but how you perceive things.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Wednesday February 21 2018, @06:37PM (4 children)
Some changes could bring it closer. You identified a big one, make it possible to just send deltas. Add a torrent like system with signed data and they cut way down on bandwidth costs while keeping things updated.
That would help, but the way it is now, it seems that this goes against business models. OSMand in particular only lets you download 3 maps for free, and wants you to pay to download more (including updates, I think).
If they add site metadata (like store hours, web page, phone number, etc) those records could be owned by the business for the purpose of updates.
I wonder how much it'd bloat up the datasets to include this information. But having the business "own" this data only works if there's some organization in place to make sure businesses can update this data, that other people can't sabotage it, etc. Someone running a restaurant might want to sabotage the information about their competitors, posting that they're closed or have short hours on important holidays, for instance.
But agred, it would be very hard for a free and open project to do everything Google maps can do.
Yeah, my point exactly, and maybe they shouldn't try, and should just stick to the map data. Another thing that Google Maps does well is public transit: it'll take into account when trains/buses are scheduled to arrive and how long they take. It also takes into account historical traffic data, so you can plan how long a journey by car will take on a particular Monday morning, for instance. All this requires a lot of work and a big datacenter.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday February 22 2018, @03:59AM (3 children)
I just wish the mobile version of google maps would let me drag routes to an alternate like the browser version does (rather than just choosing between a couple proposed routes).
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 22 2018, @05:15AM
I completely agree. That's a really handy feature.
The mobile Google Maps also kinda sucks if you have multiple stops on your route; it's not that easy to look at the stops, reorder them, delete one, etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @03:23PM (1 child)
The mobile version of Google Maps USED TO let you do that. The feature was REMOVED.
Google Maps seems to just get crappier.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @03:27PM
Google Maps mobile has removed features and gotten crappier over time so I can't 100% confirm that it used to enable route dragging, but I seem to recall that it did.