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

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: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday February 21 2018, @08:34PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday February 21 2018, @08:34PM (#641385)

    People do the work for Google maps. You establish a business account with Google (which is free), claim your business on Google Maps (I don't remember the process, but I think it involved answering physical mail sent to the address). Then you keep the information up-to-date yourself. Google Maps is important enough that business owners are willing to do this. There's no reason the same couldn't work for OSM

    That's wrong, and you just showed why. According to you, Google sends physical mail to the business address, then allows that business to maintain the information, which is kept on Google's servers.

    Who's going to pay for sending out millions of pieces of mail to these businesses? That's not cheap. Who's going to maintain all this infrastructure? Those datacenters don't run themselves. This isn't a static file: the businesses need to be able to log in to their accounts and update their info, and then that info needs to get to users quickly to be useful.

    And it does involve a budget - someone has to handle the initial check, to make sure you are the business owner.

    Exactly. Free software rarely does well with stuff like this: it requires some type of business. If you're lucky, you can set up something like Mozilla that's a nonprofit company, which can hire employees to do this stuff. But that takes a lot of money, which has to come from somewhere. Who's going to contribute millions of dollars needed to set this up for mapping, when there's already *multiple* commercial competitors with products that are totally free for users?

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