Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

&gt; Microsoft Bing uses OSM in several regions, and is slowly moving from it’s traditional providers to OSM globally. They provide machine-learning (ML) datasets that they have computed from areal imagery. They employ nobody in the OSM community.<p>Microsoft Bing made its aerial imagery available for OSM editing, this is often very very very useful for mapping (speaking from own experience as an OSM mapper).<p>See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;maps&#x2F;product&#x2F;imagery-service-editor-app-apis-terms" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;maps&#x2F;product&#x2F;imagery-service...</a><p>&gt; The rights that you have under this agreement are limited solely to aerial imagery use in a non-commercial online editor application of OpenStreetMap maps (an &quot;Application&quot;)<p>see also extra info in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.openstreetmap.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bing_Maps#Terms.2C_Clarifications" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.openstreetmap.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bing_Maps#Terms.2C_Clari...</a><p>It is an interesting case as cost of that is basically nothing to Microsoft, this action has a very clear benefits to them, has negative influence on their competition like Google, has basically no negative side effects to OSM community (unlike company hiring people) and provides service that would cost OSM community ridiculous amounts of money if we would need to buy it (it would be impossible for us to buy worldwide aerial imagery of such quality).<p>It is weird to not mention it in that article.

Here is why you should contribute to OSM even though there are major players profiting from it:<p>OSM is big enough and good enough that all the tech giants (except Google) would do better to start with OSM and improve it to meet their needs than to start a new, completely proprietary map from scratch.<p>That means that we are in an amazing place where in addition to the substantial volunteer OSM community, there are contributions from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and hundreds or thousands of smaller companies all coming back in to a single global map that everyone can use. It&#x27;s very worth it to do work that strengthens OSM, as it increases the number of companies that will use it, and possibly contribute back, rather than doing work the world at large won&#x27;t benefit from.<p>P.S. As a disclaimer, I am co-founder of Geocode Earth (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;geocode.earth" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;geocode.earth</a>) a small business that does indeed profit from OSM (and other open) data. We also contribute back both through OSM contributions and by releasing our core software as the Pelias geocoder (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pelias.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pelias.io</a>)

This article is just factually wrong.<p>It alleges repeatedly that Facebook, Apple, Microsoft etc “employ nobody in the OSM community”. They do. Microsoft even employed the founder of OSM, Steve Coast, for a while.<p>If your criterion is ‘involved in OSM prior to current employment’, I could name a bunch of people currently working for Facebook, Amazon, Snap etc of whom that’s true. (One such person even stood for election to the OSM Foundation board this month.)<p>But, as others have pointed out, I’d hope we’re more welcoming than that. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re editing OSM you’re part of the community.

About 10 years ago I helped build a piece of software that would use OSM data and that data needed to be precise. Turned out that a lot of the Tiger Maps scans were not super accurate so I urged our company to hire a data entry team to clean up a bunch of it. We had I think 5 or 6 people whose job it was to precisely clean up OSM data based on satellite imagery in a bunch of small-medium cities as well as Chicago. Everyone benefitted from this which was awesome.

It&#x27;s a good question to ask. Many here probably aren&#x27;t old enough to remember the cautionary tale of CDDB&#x2F;Gracenote [1].<p>Back when Compact Discs were still a thing. on Winamp, WMP, etc you wanted to display a list of tracks, covert art, the artist, etc. Volunteers contributed this data from their own discs (that could be identified). This was before MP3s and ID3 tagging.<p>So volunteers built the CDDB with this data. The entity that &quot;owned&quot; it silently put in a copyright assignment with any submissions and ultimately became a company called Gracenote, which still exists today. They also removed the free access to CDDB.<p>None of this matters today but at the time it was a huge loss and a betrayal.<p>So I personally think it&#x27;s completely fine to contribute to something like OSM as long as there are guarantees in there that the open access to that data can&#x27;t be lost. It doesn&#x27;t bother me if the likes of Apple and Microsoft use that for commercial uses, particularly if in doing so they contribute data back to the project.<p>This is why Stackoverflow dumps [2] were done in the first place and why they&#x27;re so important: as a guarantee against that data being taken away or put behind a paywall.<p>Beware the CDDBs of the world however.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;CDDB" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;CDDB</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;224873&#x2F;all-stack-exchange-data-dumps&#x2F;224922#224922" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;224873&#x2F;all-stack-ex...</a>

I struggle with contributing to open source but in a different context. In my opinion, the video games industry is information sparse on high quality software engineering practices, for whatever reason (NDAs, language&#x2F;culture, etc). I am already authoring content that basically imports DevOps practices and experiences I have from my day job into a video games context. I believe practitioners have an edge over non-practitioners. Yet I hesitate to release it.<p>I hesitate because ultimately I cannot fully silence my ego. I want to release my content and have a positive impact on game creators. I know my ideas and hard work will be taken and rebroadcast by other teacher content creators without credit. In abstract that my ideas will spread to a wider audience will maximize its impact. ...But I want my hard work to be recognized and credited which is hamstringing my willingness to release.<p>My ego wants me to keep this information private and work in a closed source way. &quot;Ha, I am so smart that I grok this stuff and can apply it,&quot; I imagine my mindset saying. &quot;Look at how these fools struggle, ignorant of a better way.&quot; However; I have benefited from others making the brave choice to work in an open source way.<p>How do people who give away their work (MIT or CC license) think about it? I feel like a jerk for benefiting from a culture of open source and yet I have this inner conflict?

The post claims both that some companies contribute to OSM and that they do not employ anyone from the OSM community.<p>There is some level of gatekeeping here, as the blog implies is that that employees at those companies are not part of the OSM community although they contribute to OSM.<p>With this attitude (&quot;no true OSM contributor unless I approve of&quot;), it is hard to grow the community by welcoming new people.

At this point, I don&#x27;t really consider OSM an OSS project, but an infrastructure.<p>It has small value for everyone, but all combined usage, it has immense economical value for the society. All alone, it&#x27;s not really useful to end-users, but it can help a lot of businesses that couldn&#x27;t exist before it.<p>Maps are already considered infrastructure, since they are already made by governments!<p>The only missing part to say OSM is an infrastructure, is for governments to actually contribute to it.

I contribute to OSM because I want to make alternatives to Google Maps like OsmAnd or Organicmaps more useful. That big players also use open data does not invalidate my reasons to contribute.

I&#x27;ve enjoyed Google Maps for many years and never paid for it. Apple MapKit appears to be free. I improve the experience for others when I help improve the maps and in turn my experience is improved by the contributions of others. It&#x27;s costs Google and Apple money to provide the infrastructure for this, which they obtain in various ways such as advertising. It doesn&#x27;t bother me if someone wants to advertise their store on a map I helped create. In fact, even that improves the amount of information I have about a place.<p>My answer to the title question is a strong &quot;yes&quot; in this case and I consider it akin to a grocery store putting up signs saying &quot;Please help us keep costs down and pass the savings along to you by returning your cart to the cart stand.&quot; Giant mega corp Walmart does this if memory serves.<p>I like that humanity has built such an amazing thing as maps and like it when people return their shopping carts.

&gt; They employ nobody in the OSM community.<p>I imagine many of the employees that do the work mentioned in the article would consider themselves part of the OSM community.

&gt; <i>They employ nobody in the OSM community.</i><p>Malone keeps saying this but I don’t think it means what he says it is.<p>Those large entities employ <i>lots</i> of people who add to OSM. Not only do they add content but by his own description they do QC and add other new features and support.<p>Their contributions are no different (except in magnitude) than a single, tiny contribution I might make, yet presumably that would make me “part of the community” but not them?

&gt; The only one I can recommend as being easy to use is StreetComplete for Android<p>This is nice to hear as major contributor to that software (if you use that app and something is unclear then it is likely a bug that should be reported to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;streetcomplete&#x2F;StreetComplete&#x2F;issues" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;streetcomplete&#x2F;StreetComplete&#x2F;issues</a> )

&gt; They employ nobody in the OSM community.<p>If they are contributing data, they are <i>part of</i> the OSM community.

I use OSM data for free too, and don&#x27;t employ anyone from OSM.<p>Why wouldn&#x27;t I fix the data around where I live, if I can, and if it helps me, and everyone else trying to navigate here? I fix stuff here, someone else fixes stuff somewhere else, there are also gamified apps (atleast one), where you can get &quot;badges&quot; to input basic data to OSM, and everyone profits.

If all open source software had new license terms tomorrow that said &quot;no commercial use unless you pay me a license fee&quot;, they&#x27;d just stop using open source. Using it is a business calculation. If you don&#x27;t get support and you have to pay for it, you might as well pay for proprietary software that you can get support from.<p>And maybe that&#x27;s fine! Maybe we shouldn&#x27;t let companies use the software <i>at all</i>. But that would have ecosystem-shaking results as the costs are passed down to consumers and fewer engineers are employed. At this point, the whole world is dependent on OSS.<p>Open Source does not exist for people to get paid. If it did, it&#x27;d be the worst software gig in the world, by pay anyway :) To ask for money just because somebody else is getting money and you&#x27;re not is simply envy and greed. Either ask for the money up front before you release the thing, or don&#x27;t worry about what other people are getting paid.

&gt; I’m not gonna lie, I kind of like that idea. In the OSM world you just have to have faith that your edits are helping people. There is basically no feedback loop.<p>Do people really need this? I use OSM whenever I go on a walk anywhere in the world and I often think about the local mappers who maintain the data. I can say with almost complete certainty that someone, somewhere has appreciated my own OSM contributions at some point. That&#x27;s enough for me.

Yes we should definitely kill off the only mapping solution accessible to bootstrapping startups because big players are semi-freeloading.

OpenStreetMap has an &quot;on the ground rule&quot; where a street, a street name, a city, a city name etc. are determined by who currently has control on the ground. So the Malvinas are the Falkland Islands, Derry is Londonderry etc.<p>The sole exception to this is the Crimea, which the OSM board ruled is exempt from this rule, as they favor the Ukrainian government over the Russian government.

Google Maps is built on uncompensated user submissions, much of it involuntary (data from navigation, live and historical location, etc).<p>We aren&#x27;t their customers, we&#x27;re the employees. That&#x27;s why data ownership is such a verboten topic, it breaks their entire model.

My friends and I use a lot of Garmin fitness trackers and bike computers for endurance sports training. Those devices use maps derived from OSM. So when I contribute data to OSM for free I (eventually) see a direct benefit with better navigation on my devices.

The main difference is that, with OSM, a third party can make direct commercial profit from my edits, but <i>so can anyone else including me</i>.

&gt; It may be mainly made by individuals in there spare time, but the big tech companies are making millions of it.<p>Dude please proof read. I walk into an article making a statement and the very second sentence has errors like this, you&#x27;re losing credibility.<p>&gt; They are reasonably good at fixing and contributing data to OSM in those regions. They employ nobody in the OSM community.<p>Except whoever contributes data to OSM in those regions? The same for every example in the list. Amazon is literally mapping towns for all of us and giving it away for free. What&#x27;s the criteria for &quot;in the OSM community&quot; if not &quot;contributes to OSM&quot;? What&#x27;s the point of FOSS if not this?

Stranger on the street asks for directions:<p>I’m sorry, I can’t provide directions. I make $80&#x2F;hour. Spending a minute giving you directions costs me more than $1 per minute, so please give me a $1.33 and then I’ll tell you where to go.

I’m curious to know if the companies that use OSM actually contribute back? Like fixing all the wrong&#x2F;malicious data.

Does anyone know what happened to the Amazon team ? I was following their edits here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;resultmaps.neis-one.org&#x2F;osm-changesets?comment=amap" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;resultmaps.neis-one.org&#x2F;osm-changesets?comment=amap</a><p>They were one of the main contributors to OSM and now they nearly stop contributing to OSM (they are still contributing but maybe 10 times less than before)

I&#x27;ve always thought OSM&#x27;s data license should be more BSD-ish than the current LGPLish license. If you were trying to privately build and edit data from OSM, there&#x27;d be a pretty strong incentive to get most of your updates and corrections upstreamed back into OSM, (especially for things that are broadly of interest to the rest of the community) because eventually someone will also create those updates in the upstream OSM, and then you&#x27;ll have to deal with how to merge your changes with the OSM changes.<p>I think OSM would benefit more with more people building on the dataset, because even if a smaller percentage actually contributed back, they&#x27;d make up for it with a larger overall set of people building on the dataset. And I think they&#x27;d get a larger set of people building on the dataset with a more permissive license.<p>(The obvious counterpoint is OSM is doing just fine with its current license)

Outsiders profit from a public commons project, so we shouldn&#x27;t contribute to the commons? Am I misunderstanding the argument here?<p>Wikipedia helps innumerable companies do basic research. Should I stop contributing to Wikipedia? When I clean trash from a local river, Sam&#x27;s Row Boat rental benefits. Should I stop cleaning the river?

I recently picked up OSM mapping. The tools are way better than ten years ago when I had a look: I like both the web editor and the &quot;Go Map!!&quot; iOS application. My motivation is mostly so that I can have accurate results when visiting or re-visiting a place. In a few months (or weeks), the sheer number of OSM consumers allow you to receive the benefit of your own changes. Write once, read everywhere.<p>I don&#x27;t advance this is necessarily sufficient or OSM is getting a great deal for its value, but it&#x27;s what got me involved after a long period watching from the sidelines: it was a wise suggestion from an AllTrails staff member on a support ticket.

I contribute so that friends can find my house. I hope everyone reads OSM data and updates their maps. Too many people put my address in GPS and end up several miles away.

I spent time writing careful reviews for Netflix. A couple years ago, they deleted them all.<p>I spent time adding missing pictures for Amazon&#x27;s book listings. A couple years ago, they deleted them all. Those books reverted to having no cover pictures.<p>I don&#x27;t bother contributing anymore. I didn&#x27;t mind doing it for free, but if they don&#x27;t care, I don&#x27;t either.

To me this article reads like &quot;I want to get a job paid by the big players&quot;. The fact is, it&#x27;s not a one way street, they&#x27;re contributing back with data. We all benefit from this.<p>While I dislike what these companies stand for (I use a Linux desktop and a degoogled phone) in this case I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re in the wrong.

I wish Ordnance Survey in the UK would help out a little with the UK dataset - even with just say the buildings

I am happy to contribute for free, but after what happened with Mapillary, I would like a clause that states that should OSM be sold, I would be entitled to a portion of the sale amount commensurate with my contributions, or the option to withhold my contributions from the sale.

While working with municipalities, they provided us with shapefile of bicycle routes and add to our systems. It would have been better if they just added bicycle routes to OSM but I think they don&#x27;t want to take responsibility of maintaining it.

Can someone give details about what is the best way to contribute? Is there some easy way like just installing an app in my phone and receive popup notifications to answer some quick questions when I&#x27;m in a queue of a random local shop?

I am against any large scale collection of data that can be used to take away an individual&#x27;s privacy or to assist a government&#x2F;business&#x2F;person&#x27;s ability to track someone&#x27;s location or residence. Its one thing to not be able to do anything about a private business collecting this information on their own volition, but its another to actually aid in its collection yourself. The more you accept and buy into this reality the faster it will accelerate out of control with opposition being not just those who stand to gain from its existence, but from useful idiots who don&#x27;t understand sunk cost fallacy. The biggest hindrance in the long term happiness of the human species is the inability to reverse change. Even while we can admit a certain change is bad, we can never mitigate further change let alone put the cat back in the bag.

Yes you absolutely should. But, should you expect to make a living out of it? No.

&gt; Google says I’ve helped 90 000 people find the eye clinic in the last six months<p>Presumably the clinic is not seeing 500 patients&#x2F;customers per day, xor is a very large facility that thus should be findable.

I have tried providing a correction to OSM, they never got moderated or integrated. But there is a local club because they used the email address I provided to invite me.<p>I don’t think I want to spend time doing it again.

I went on an OSM editing binge a few years ago to make Pokémon Go&#x27;s in-game map better. Now that I&#x27;ve done that, I haven&#x27;t had much reason to edit it more.

I have contributed a few details to OSM, as well as to Google Maps. Not for any high-flying moral reasons, but because I use them and found the small errors irritating.

Corollary: Why are contributions to OpenStreetMap systematically undervalued?<p>I think it&#x27;s a much more interesting question WHY we are being asked to contribute to OSM for free. Why isn&#x27;t it possible&#x2F;feasible to gain compensation relative to the amount of value contributed? And what does that mean for our &quot;free market&quot; in general. If you can&#x27;t compensate this kind of project, are they being repressed by the inherent incentive structures?<p>I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s a failure of the OSM project, but rather a failure of our economic system.

Seems like a great use case for web3 and DAOs later on when they become a bit less anarchic. You could tokenise contributions to OpenStreetMap.

I contribute fixes to hiking trails. That doesn&#x27;t really help the big companies much, but does help my fellow hikers.

No, because you shouldn&#x27;t do work for giant tech companies for free.

This sounds like another tired variation on the &quot;open source is dead&quot; article that popped up here a few weeks ago.<p>People contribute to things for free for a variety of reasons. I&#x27;ve made only a couple contributions to OSM, but I&#x27;m happy to do so. The world needs freely available mapping data. Sure, the companies that benefit from it the most may not contribute financially or with manpower (just like with most open source), but that doesn&#x27;t change the usefulness of OSM.<p>I&#x27;d much rather we have something like OSM than have all this data locked up behind paywalls and contracts. Who does and doesn&#x27;t support the work is irrelevant to me.

This article is a bit scattered. But it makes one good point: Big Tech companies are profiting off of the OSM data set, while employing no one working on OSM. How do we change that?

no. I wish osm would adjust their licensing to prevent reuse of contributions to build non free (as in open) servicing.

Should you contribute to yourself for free?

The rare exception to Betteridge&#x27;s law of headlines.

Could this be a good use case for cryptocurrency?