Slashdot Mirror
Why OpenStreetMap Should Be a Priority for the Open Source Community (linuxjournal.com)
"Despite its low profile, OpenStreetMap is arguably one of the most important projects for the future of free software," argues Glyn Moody, author of Rebel Code: Linux And The Open Source Revolution, in a new Linux Journal article shared by long-time Slashdot reader carlie:
The rise of mobile phones as the primary computing device for billions of people, especially in developing economies, lends a new importance to location and movement. Many internet services now offer additional features based on where users are, where they are going and their relative position to other members of social networks. Self-driving cars and drones are two rapidly evolving hardware areas where accurate geographical information is crucial. All of those things depend upon a map in critical ways, and they require large, detailed datasets. OpenStreetMap is the only truly global open alternative to better-known, and much better-funded geodata holdings, such as Google Maps.
The current dominance of the latter is a serious problem for free software -- and freedom itself. The data that lies behind Google Maps is proprietary. Thus, any open-source program that uses Google Maps or other commercial mapping services is effectively including proprietary elements in its code. For purists, that is unacceptable in itself. But even for those with a more pragmatic viewpoint, it means that open source is dependent on a company for data that can be restricted or withdrawn at any moment....
Although undoubtedly difficult, creating high-quality map-based services is a challenge that must be tackled by the Open Source community if it wants to remain relevant in a world dominated by mobile computing. The bad news is that at the moment, millions of people are happily sending crucial geodata to proprietary services like Waze, as well as providing free bug-fixes for Google Maps. Far better if they could be working with equal enthusiasm and enjoyment on open projects, since the resulting datasets would be freely available to all, not turned into corporate property. The good news is that OpenStreetMap provides exactly the right foundation for creating those open map-based services, which is why supporting it must become a priority for the Open Source world.
The current dominance of the latter is a serious problem for free software -- and freedom itself. The data that lies behind Google Maps is proprietary. Thus, any open-source program that uses Google Maps or other commercial mapping services is effectively including proprietary elements in its code. For purists, that is unacceptable in itself. But even for those with a more pragmatic viewpoint, it means that open source is dependent on a company for data that can be restricted or withdrawn at any moment....
Although undoubtedly difficult, creating high-quality map-based services is a challenge that must be tackled by the Open Source community if it wants to remain relevant in a world dominated by mobile computing. The bad news is that at the moment, millions of people are happily sending crucial geodata to proprietary services like Waze, as well as providing free bug-fixes for Google Maps. Far better if they could be working with equal enthusiasm and enjoyment on open projects, since the resulting datasets would be freely available to all, not turned into corporate property. The good news is that OpenStreetMap provides exactly the right foundation for creating those open map-based services, which is why supporting it must become a priority for the Open Source world.
Open street map is not open source. It is open data. The two are completely different.
'long time reader'? Carlie is the publisher of the Linux Journal. She runs it and has for decades.
It's a priority to turn that open source into closed source and charge for it.
Because a bunch do exactly that.
I've tried to point friends at OSM but the problem is that it's no where NEAR as good as google maps. Sorry it just ISN'T:
1. There's no instructions mode, unless you try to find an external site which then sucks at finding addresses and doesn't have near the features of Google Maps.
2. Its address lookup sucks. You can type almost anything into Google maps and it'll find what you want. OSM, not really.
3. There's no streetview! People want to check out where they are going in advance. OSM simply .... doesn't do it.
4. It doesn't have integrated image views, the way you can click a location in Google Maps and see photos from the area.
5. There's no good way to see the route distance between two points on openstreetmap.
6. The layout display doesn't look as good as Google Maps.
I could go on but point is people want software that works. OSS is great but if it isn't going to be as functional as closed software people ain't gonna use it.
Solution: OSS has to reach feature parity with closed source software. Yes, that means HARD WORK! If OSS programmers aren't gonna do that hard work then guess what people won't want to use what they make.
There are reasons this stuff is not used by most people. The constant refrain from the OSS crowd is to pretend those issues don't exist BUT THEY DO! People want those things and if you don't deliver, they won't use your software. The end.
This is definitely a real issue, but it doesn't mention the most important part - the part that all the big mapping companies already know.
If you want people to contribute their data (and time) en masse, you have to give them a high-quality mobile experience.
If Open Street Map were as easy to use as Google Maps is on mobile, people would try it. And then OSM would get their traffic/new road data organically. But until OSS developers start prioritizing the average user's experience, they will simply never get to where they can compete with Google, Waze, Apple, et al.
OpenStreetMap is a sort of open data that everybody needs, and should be available under the same terms as Open Source software or very similar ones. Open Source projects don't always succeed, for separate reasons from their desirability. Note that OpenOffice existed for years and got great benefit from Sun's contribution of StarDivision's work, but project participation was handicapped by Sun's management. When LibreOffice split off, it was suddenly so much more viable.
OpenStreetMap has had a commercial involvement which might not have helped - and as far as I can tell is mostly over. And I hear it's difficult to become an editor. I am not a geodata developer. I'd like to hear from some folks who are, and who have tried to participate or who can try now and report back.
Bruce Perens.
The bad news is, millions of people are happily sending any and all data with complete disregard for the consequences to themselves and to society as a whole. Because for most people, being able to instantly send lolcats to their cousin, inform the world of their latest bowel movement or watching the soccer match live on their phone is much more important than liberty and privacy.
Oh and by the way, Waze was bought by Google in 2013. Don't make it out to be a separate entity: it's part of the collective, and it's out for your data.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Hand editing data will never achieve something to compete with google maps which is far more than just a streetmap. Google also has real-time traffic data, streetview, and sidewalk / path data sufficient to help me get to a destination's door. I use all of this on a near-daily basis and would love to see open source applications that compete with this functionality. I agree that the open data is critical to that but...
Without fleets of vehicles and massive amounts of data center processing to convert images to information, how do we get there?
The best possibility I can think of for getting much of it would be to attract large numbers of people to run an app that tracks them at high resolution and donate the data. But there are problems.
How do you attract users to run the app? Google does it with their real-time driving directions app, but that presents a chicken - egg problem because you've got to get within reach of their capabilities to attract users to get the data necessary to get within reach of their capabilities.
How do you pay for the compute time to process the live data into useful information such as realtime traffic flow, most used entrances, sidewalk paths, locations that must be missing a road on the map (many users crossed at driving speed from point A to point B where no road exists), etc.
Assuming you could crack collecting the data, how would you pay for server space for street view data?
Realistically, the only way I can see getting open data of this size and complexity is for governments or large groups of companies to pay for it and choose to make it open data.
With paid developers they can be told to work on those things that are not "fun" but contribute to the quality of the experience. With unpaid developers most want to work on the funnest parts, s noboody do things like your list.
Natural language search is something Google is very very good at. I would not place any hope to see openstreetmap get close to Google on that. It's in Google's wheelhouse.
The OSM user interface is tough even by Open Source standards. I managed to get some updates in my region but it was a struggle. I had previously submitted the same updates to Google maps to no effect. Within 3 days of the changes showing up on OSM they appeared in Google. Maybe a coincidence but it appears what's yours is Google's but what's Googles is their own.
Hobby. Hobbyist. Simple.
Mostly random stuff.
> might very well object to OpenStreetMap because of the non-GPL licensing terms used by the project.
This doesn't make sense to me for two reasons. It seems to conflate open source with GPL, and also the OpenStreetMap software *is* GPL licensed.
Open source does not mean GPL. I'm fact, the people who write and promote the GPL will tell you they support Free Software, NOT open source. They'll gladly explain the difference to you. So open source doesn't mean GPL - in fact, not only can something be open source with being GPL, the two philosophies have some fundamental differences.
Also, the primary software for open street map IS GPL, so I'm not sure why you'd say "no-GPL license". The GPL is of course a software license. The OSM project put the same terms the GPL uses into a database license. It says basically the same thing the GPL says- if you distribute it, whoever you distribute it to gets the same rights you have. That doesn't change if you make some modifications before distributing it - your modified copy is still open license.
I think there are multiple roles for OpenStreetMap to play, but one that came to my attention was mapping areas where Google, etc. haven't gone in order to help get food and power to people after a disaster.
I spent (too little) time voluntarily mapping out areas of Puerto Rico, through a well-coordinated effort to analyze and review satellite and aerial photos of less densely populated areas. This type of crowdsourcing is pretty cool...
One of the sites to visit: Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team
I don't have any problems submitting to OSM (NY, US). Changes show up within minutes.
Yes, mod down to -1, because burying the reasons the public doesn't use OSM is absolutely going to fix them.
Hand, meet forehead.
When I run Google Maps on Android it has stuff like showing me real time traffic. Voice search. Showing my contacts' locations on the map in real time. Real time updates on public transit status (delays etc). "Search along route".
Openstreet simply needs better phone integration. The days of sitting at a static desktop computer are over for most people: they only did that because they had no choice. It's a mobile world now, Integration with mobile features is essential for wide adoption.
Helping brown people? You best be joking...
I've tried on several occasions to get data out of OSM. Half their "preferred" easy-to-use tools simply don't work. I've jumped in at the deep end, installed a GIS, imported what I thought was the data I wanted, and spend the next hour struggling to get it even to display the area I'm interested in. I gave up trying to export it in any usable format.
Nowadays I just use things like Inkatlas, who's business model is to serve to OSM data in a nice pretty format and charge you for it, which I'd normally be slightly miffed about but if you place any value on your time it's by far the cheaper option.
I know the stock OSS response to this is "fix it yourself" but there's no point lauding up this huge free dataset you're offering if you need a PHD and a week of free time to do anything useful with it.
I'm usually not one to suggest that the government take over private services but it seems like it would make a lot of sense that local governments should publish street map data in a public format. After all, they're the ones who build the roads in the first place. It seems like the tools and current tools they use to do mapping and surveying is in ancient, scanned document formats, or sitting in a filing cabinet somewhere gathering dust.
I spent most of my career building GIS maps for Calgary, Canada, for the water & sewer systems; our whole asset-management strategy was based on a GIS map/database of all infrastructure. (Some screen snaps: http://brander.ca/work.html )
It was like the sun coming out when I found open-source GIS solutions in PostGIS and QGIS about 2013, and it freed me from the "ESRI jail", wherein for large corporate mapping, ESRI is the 800-lb gorilla of the market, and all its data formats are proprietary and impenetrable. That was when I found OSM, and the salient feature to me is this:
* For a building to be named in Google, the business has to pay Google.
* For a building to be identified on OSM, somebody has to like that business enough to type it in. It just needs one fan.
That's it. One serves the google accounts payable dept, one serves the general public. Really, if the map is good enough to find routes and get you there, the actual map service is a wash, and this feature is critically important.
That would be a great use for it. However, my only experience with OSM is with hiking GPS apps, like Gaia GPS, and I once used it almost exclusively. However, OSM no longer allows maps to be downloaded for offline use in these apps, and since I use it in places I am often without a cell signal, it has become useless. Does Puerto Rico have good enough cell service in the areas it would be useful?
Hobby. Hobbier. Hobbiest. Simple.
It is a sad commentary on our societal trends that I would not have cringed at this just a few years ago but now really need the "/s" to be explicit so that I know you're not making a serious statement... or are you?
Uncle Sam is going to get out his trust-busting stick and break up Google/Alphabet.
Maps - separate company
Search - separate company
Surveillance / "advertising" - separate company
Android - separate company
Chrome - separate company
Once he finishes bringing peace to Korea, President Trump is gonna start channeling Teddy Roosevelt. Get ready for it!
Maybe I got a moment of weakness but this happened... I download a piece of freeware that might be a bit well known - it has versions for Windows, Linux, OSX, phones. It applies some kind of filter to lower your screen color temperature according to the time of day (I don't care, just want to set it permanently at a particular setting, and did). This is only because an LCD display on a brand new computer has been hurting my eyes and retina due to its bad quality.
When you run it, it immediately shows a google maps embedding and asks you to show your location (for latitude/longitude). Needless to say just from an IP address it can be really precise these days. As in, from a residential IP you can get a world map centered on the building you're in! The software then immediately "telemetries" it to the company that made it (after clicking ok or next. In settings I can disable this, then it says my location data will be deleted within 24 hours).
This is a very small story about some small thing but fuck! Why is this happening in desktop software?
I expect this crap on the web with javascript on or on Google Play but now if you run some random and small desktop proprietary software it can make request to google apis without warning.
(I think I "firewalled" the software with the Windows Firewall, but if you go click on your registered location the embedded google maps view still opens. Because whatever the embedded web view is, I surely have to firewall it. Maybe I should install a software firewall and block all google IP ranges but I have no experience with that, including finding these ranges. I'm even thinking of installing the world's most famous 64bit-ready filtering software for Windows lol)
I don't edit the US version, but there has been a significant number of fraudulent "contributions", particularly from India (mostly "fixing" tool errors, imagine the result of telling a non-coder to fix coverity issues, that's about what you get).
That might have resulted in overzealous moderation.
As to the map quality, Google Maps has a clear focus on the US, cars, businesses and in select countries public transport.
For anything else, its data is shit and easily surpassed by OSM.
Don't play the hobbier-than-thou card with me, young man!
At the bottom of the
Just use Osmand, maps.me or one of the similar apps.
Downloading the bitmaps of the map was never a sensible way to go about it.
Regarding old paper maps. I like them, I find them intuitive. Maybe because I grew up with them. A lot of military, truckers and Boy Scouts learned how to read old maps.
But recently I realized that we always were in the minority. Most people have no idea where North is. A lot of people have no idea what North is. How long have maps place North at the top of the map? 500 years? Do maps in the Southern Hemisphere have North at the top?
The internet map makers long ago figured that out that most people are not good at reading maps. So they give driving directions: drive 4 miles on route 12, turn right... etc. etc.
I hate Google maps. I don't see a compass with a North icon,* it takes forever to load with all the crap, and if you want to move a few miles in any direction, you need to reload it several times.
Someone above mentioned it costs $$$ for Google to generate the maps. True. But irrelevant if the end result is so clutzy it's almost useless.
*The loss of the Compass on maps is another example of the current neomania (the opposite of Luddite: if it's new, it must be good and we should adopt it) and associated "anti-prior art" (if it's the way it has always been done, we should throw it out). One of these days someone will come up with a new and therefore better [not] cockpit design for airplanes. Forget that millions of pilots have been flying planes close to 100 years. Let's move knob A from here to there, and the result will be lives lost.
You are mistaking the tip for the iceberg. The map on openstreetmap.org is a nice gimmick, but it is not OSM. OSM is the data behind it. Front-ends like OsmAnd (for Android) are what makes OSM useful. And depending on coverage and local mappers' degree of fanaticism in the region you are interested in, OSM can be anywhere on the scale from terrible to decent, and in some rare cases it can even blow expensive specialist geodatabases out of the water. This, the terribly uneven coverage, is its fault, not the lack of shiny images on the frontpage map. FOSS UAV mission control systems do not care about a StreetView clone. They care about precise up-to-date geodata.
Of course, I would love to get an OSM web frontend that can compete with Google Maps. But this is not a component of OSM that belongs into the project, it is a use case for its data and – especially if it is to bring in completely unrelated features like images, traffic data, restaurant suggestions etc. – could and should be developed outside of it.
A significant portion of those who contribute to OSM do not use or care about the web map at all. They are in it for the data itself.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
I looked at using OpenStreetMaps as a data source for drawing hiking maps throughout the United States. OpenStreetMaps has some fairly good hiking trail data.
But I ran into two problems. First, address data for the United States in OpenStreetMaps is virtually non-existent. It appears OpenStreetMaps is concentrating on providing a specific address for specific buildings--which makes sense in countries which do not do sequential street addresses. But in the United States you can also extrapolate the street address on most streets through a linear interpolation of the address at the start and end of a street segment. This interpolation data--present in the Tiger Line census data that is the source of a lot of the streets in OpenStreetMaps for the United States--does not appear to be present after the import. This means that attempting to type in a street address in OpenStreetMaps usually fails for a US address.
The second problem is that it appears navigational information--information which would help construct navigation data (such as knowing which streets are one way) seems to be missing as well.
If I had a wishlist for improving OpenStreetMap data, it'd be these two things. Without them, and anyone serious about constructing a US map application with navigation will wind up having to license map data from a Tele Atlas (now owned by TomTom) or a NAVTEQ (now owned by Nokia as "Here").
And because both are "B2B", good luck if you're just some random hacker looking to build an interesting and specialized mapping product.
A lot of the things that use Google Maps (or, increasingly, Bing Maps) do so via the APIs as well. If you go to a hotel web site, for example, odds are that they'll have either a Google or Bing map embedded in their 'how to find us' page. It is fairly easy to do the same with OSM, but there is a quite large selection of web front ends and there's no real attempt to curate them and many are poorly documented (it took me ages, for example, to realise that the JavaScript OSM overlay library that I used for a conference was putting my waypoints in the wrong place because of a poorly documented projection option having a default that wasn't the same as the other tool that I was using). This kind of thing prevents OSM being the default choice for embedding elsewhere, which means that it doesn't get the kind of visibility that Google Maps provides.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You are not wrong in your description of the state of the OSM ecosystem, and of course I would love to see well-designed easy to use tools to bring its magic onto as many platforms as possible. But the responsibility of OSM itself ends at the API. OP was comparing openstreetmap.org's map with Google Maps as if it was meant as a 1:1 replacement – which it is not. Frankly, I would rather they removed the map from the front page and put it onto a different website, because it detracts so much from what OSM is: a database. OP was essentially complaining that the Linux kernel does not look as nice as Windows 10's desktop.
Google Maps is mostly the opposite: a visual map with some services spun around it, but with little to no access to the underlying data. And it is a commercial product engineered to generate money for Google. We could very well found a company or a foundation, stuff it with cash, hire developers and have them create an interface to OSM that rivals Google Maps. But this has nothing to do with the OSM project itself.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
Openstreetmap doesn't have everything google maps have. If that bothers you, by all means use google maps. Out goal is to provide a good map, not to "take over the world" by outcompeting everybody else.
Openstreetmap has some features Google maps don't have though. Such as lots of more detail. Useful when you're looking for other things than just addresses. Navigating on foot? We have footpaths, staircases and walkways. Bicycle? We have cycleways. Planning a trip on horseback? Openstreetmap has bridleways too.
And you can have the data on a phone/tablet, for offline navigation. Useful for navigation on mountain hikes - where there is no cell coverage. Also useful on a plane, where you're forced into airplane mode. I have seen people baffled over this - how can I navigate without downloading tiles? Because I have the vector maps for some countries on my phone, so no need for retrieving tiles. All zoom levels, because it is vector data. So I can see what I fly over. When landed, I see which gate the plane rolls towards too. Do Google even have that level of information?
The app osmand combines openstreetmap maps with wikipedia data for the locations, allowing lookup of much more than just map data.
The web map (especially on mobile because that's where you use a map) is not a "nice gimmick", it's the first impression. If they want people to build for OSM and contribute to it, they need to fix the first impression. Lots of unclickable symbols without a legend and a search function that doesn't find anything are an instant turnoff.
I have worked with large-scale, commercial, geospatial datasets as well as countless public data sources and have recently had the pleasure of deploying OSM data services. In my experience, the value of the Open Street Map data and supporting open source software is immeasurable. It’s time for public entities to realize the value of truly open data and begin contributing and reaping the benefits of open collaborative data projects, particularly Open Street Map. Public entities in the US, especially State and local Gov, seem to be well behind other parts of the World when it comes to realizing this opportunity.
Ali W
That's bullshit, OSM doesn't do have any concept of "autoconfirmed" at all.