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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: 3, Informative) by NotSanguine on Thursday February 22 2018, @12:30AM

    by NotSanguine (285) <{NotSanguine} {at} {SoylentNews.Org}> on Thursday February 22 2018, @12:30AM (#641524) Homepage Journal

    What you're missing is that, without a high-quality renderer, OSM will have trouble getting users to volunteer their time to contribute data.

    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
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