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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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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Wednesday February 21 2018, @09:19PM (1 child)
What you're missing is that, without a high-quality renderer, OSM will have trouble getting users to volunteer their time to contribute data.
Basically, it's like having a Free and open-source OS kernel like Linux, but only being able to compile it with a proprietary $$$ compiler (which in this analogy you have to use every time you use the system and you somehow can't copy the binaries from other people). Having the source isn't all that useful if the tools you need to work with it are all locked up, and telling someone they're free to make their own compiler isn't much help. Instead of doing that, they're just going to use one of the free-but-proprietary (paid by ads) alternatives, while people like you bemoan the lack of volunteer contribution.
What should OSM do? I have no idea. But the problem does appear to be real. FOSS works well when not only is the source/data freely available, but also all the tools you need to work with it. FOSS software would never have gotten very far if it relied on proprietary compilers; how many volunteers would have bothered to write Free software if they had to pay thousands of dollars for some proprietary compiler?
(Score: 3, Informative) by NotSanguine on Thursday February 22 2018, @12:30AM
Apparently, there are quite a few rendering tools [openstreetmap.org] for OSM data, most of them either GPL'd or source available.
As such, the real question is "who is going to make OSM data generally available with feature parity to other mapping platforms, hence giving end-users the impetus to contribute data?"
Presumably, there are folks doing so already (likely without feature parity), but perhaps not in a completely FOSS/ad free/libre way. Which is unsurprising, given that providing such a service (not just the data, but the rendering, management and maintenance of infrastructure, updates to the data set, etc., etc., etc.) has significant start up and operational costs.
There are many ways this *could* be addressed. However, I'm not very sanguine about the prospects that this will happen anytime soon.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr