OpenStreetMap has a series of mechanisms to combat malicious editors. Mostly they get found out quickly by local mappers and problem edits are reverted. Sometimes it takes a while, but it happens. Also, with lots of editors, sometimes the problems just get fixed as data is changed.
Some power users monitor the map closely, and OSM does have a (very small) number of moderators who can block malicious users.
OSM is also working on actively improving communication about edits, so problem users can be identified more quickly and efficiently.
Source: I'm the author of that blog post, I'm also one of the aforementioned moderators, and I'm also working on the improved communication (it's OSM's GSoC project this year).
In my case, the only things I require are that the work cite me as the original author and that they are distributed under the same terms. I don't require explicit permission, nor do I ask for any money. I do also ask that the original article is linked to, and that my twitter name is mentioned. Those aren't required, but they're pretty small accomodations to make. That's just so that I can try to build an audience.
The issue isn't equipment, it's storage and bandwith.
If you collect a small city's worth of data, you'll have quite a lot of images. Maybe only a terabyte, if you're lucky, but probably several terabytes. Now extend that to an entire state/province, or a small country. You'll quickly be racking up terabytes and pedabytes of data.
"No problem, storage is cheap." you might be thinking, but storage gets expensive as you increase the demands of the storage. All of this storage needs to be available immediately, so it can't be stored on near time storage devices, which might make it less expensive. And it must be stored in such a way that makes it redundant in case of hardware failure, so either using disk, or system level data replication.
And now that you've stored the data, you need to serve it to users. Pushing out a small amount of data to a user isn't a problem. 2 cents a gigabyte seems cheap. But if you need to serve a whole country worth of data, with tens or hundreds of thousands of users, you now hit bandwidth issues- bandwith caps, and overage costs. Getting a larger pipe to the user costs more money, and deals that seemed reasonable start to become very expensive very quickly.
You'd quickly start talking about needing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just to store the data, and then hundreds of thousands (or more) to serve it out.
Commercial organizations are not going to be inclined to put money towards something when they don't have to, and the burden on users would be incredibly high.
It can take a while for the geocoder to pick up on issues.
Also, if you put a note on your area and link to it, I can take a look.
Addresses are particularly tricky for a variety of reasons that I won't bore you with, but could make your head spin.
You're right that there is a need to make addresses easier to work with, but in 99% of cases, you can just draw the building and tag it with the address and all should be good.
When you say "the result doesn't change"- can you elaborate exactly what you mean?
Addresses are quite difficult to get right (no one gets them right, not even the guys with billions of dollars to spend).
You can get a lot of help with these kinds of issues on the mailing lists, help.osm.org, the IRC channel, or the web forums. And depending on where you are, you may even have a local group of mappers to help you. So you have a community to help you through any editing issues you might encounter.
If you look at OpenStreetMap's maps of North Korea in comparison to Google, you see that the OSM maps are of much higher quality, as well as being Free (unlike Google MapMaker):
I don't speak for the project. I'm just a contributor, just like if I were a Wikipedia contributor.
> May be you could suggest the "free-as-in-beer users" of OSM to to add a sponsor link to their search engine.
I don't know what a sponsor link to a search engine is, but the license dictates usage, and everyone is in full compliance with the license.
> For instance, I find fairly difficult to edit maps in open street map, but if there was a good interface to allow the user to report back to OSM that an information is wrong with a descriptive text might help mappers that know how to edit the maps to correct them.
This question has multiple answers, so let me try my best to address them:
1) If you're interested in learning more about OSM, I highly recommend joining the newbies list. It's very low traffic and very high quality.
2) Personally, I think most mapping in OSM isn't that hard (sometimes it is but not usually). Maybe if you explained what you found hard, we could work on that?
3) The suggestion for textual feedback back to OSM is already in the works for the new website, which will hopefully be up later this year. I think that's the bridge between mappers and non-mapping contributors you're asking about.
> it just doesn't contain the terms that (apparently) the developer would like
No.... It's a term that the article of this slashdot blurb doesn't like. We in the project (including me, the person who is being paraphrased) have no issue with anyone making money off the project.
I want to make a few clarifications to the article.
1. This was, as Roblimo points out, a Facebook chat. This wasn't an interview and I didn't know it was going to be the subject of an article. I was having a conversation with a friend, but when friends are reporters... well mea culpa.
2. Bing is not doing evil here. They are in full compliance with the license as far as I know. And they have expressed interest in offering the project help in the future. I stated a fact, which is that nothing concrete has some out yet, but that's not quite the same "they don't give back.". It's my hope that they will do something for the project, but they're not required to.
3. Lots of companies use OpenStreetMap to make money. There's nothing wrong with that. And many of the same individuals who make money off OSM are its biggest supporters in terms of spreading the word, in terms of helping support the OpenStreetMap Foundation, and by going out and mapping their neighborhoods. There's no separation in my mind between these people and other contributors.
4. The license is essentially attribution-sharealike. It's like the GPL. If there's modification of our data, they're required to make it available to others under the same terms as they received it. That's the license, and that's what everyone is following.
I want to make sure this confusion is cleared up, and if there are any other impressions that are wrong based on this article, I want to apologize for them.
Besides everything else people have said about duplication of effort, there's also a number of "on the fence" people like myself.
Sirius has several stations I want, but XM has Air America.
My biggest concern with this merger is that, in the end, they won't strive for more diversity, but will decide the market is locked up and cut funding.
I personally would love to see more rebroadcast radio stations from around the world, and more new talent from sources like individual podcasts and small music publishers, but with a locked market, what incentive would an XM/Serius company have to bring that to the air?
I don't think it was purposeful; I think they genuinely hadn't heard of a person wanting a refund back from Windows before. The first person I spoke with on the phone[1] (vs by email[2]) seems a bit hostile to me getting the refund, but the second person (Seema, who I thanked by name at the end) was absolutely interested in helping me, but clearly hadn't heard of anyone else doing this.
One of the reasons I emphasized being polite so much is that it's easy to become frustrated, and thinking that they're doing this specifically to prevent you from getting your refund certainly could make you angry, and that won't help you or the customer service rep.
[1] I wrote the article.
[2] I implied in the article that I was going to help save you time, I wasted a lot of time trying to get my refund by email.
When I configured the host on Dell's web site, I made sure that it didn't come with any bundled software. The OS was the only thing that you couldn't remove.
I've kept low profile on the Slashdot comments to my article, but I just don't agree with you here.
The argument that anyone could return Windows has/always/ been there. Unless you believe in laws like UCITA (which luckily hasn't passed in most states), you could always return your unwanted Windows.
I believe that perhaps 1-2% of laptops being sold are running some other operating system than Microsoft Windows (not including those from Apple or Sun). Most people, even now, don't know they can get a Windows refund. Of those who do know, many figure that it's too time consuming and not worth the time.
If you don't think it's worth the time, then that's perfectly okay.
But if you don't have to spend $50 on something you didn't want, I think it's worth it.
My intention in writing the article was to reduce the time it took to get your refund. If you can streamline the process from 2 hours (which is about what I spend in total) to 30-40 minutes, then spending the time/effort seems more reasonable, so maybe more people will do it.
Slashdot Mirror
OpenStreetMap has a series of mechanisms to combat malicious editors. Mostly they get found out quickly by local mappers and problem edits are reverted. Sometimes it takes a while, but it happens. Also, with lots of editors, sometimes the problems just get fixed as data is changed.
Some power users monitor the map closely, and OSM does have a (very small) number of moderators who can block malicious users.
OSM is also working on actively improving communication about edits, so problem users can be identified more quickly and efficiently.
Source: I'm the author of that blog post, I'm also one of the aforementioned moderators, and I'm also working on the improved communication (it's OSM's GSoC project this year).
I can tell you, because I wrote a blog post about it:
http://blog.emacsen.net/blog/2...
(I'm the author of the original article- ie I'm the guy in the video)
In my case, the only things I require are that the work cite me as the original author and that they are distributed under the same terms. I don't require explicit permission, nor do I ask for any money. I do also ask that the original article is linked to, and that my twitter name is mentioned. Those aren't required, but they're pretty small accomodations to make. That's just so that I can try to build an audience.
Yes, it originally said I wrote it for the Guardian. I asked Roblimo to change it, and he did. No harm, no foul.
I just want to make clear to anyone who wants to use my post (this or others on my blog) that they're free to do so under the same terms (CC-BY-SA).
You don't need to use a phone. You could use a GPS, or use a tablet without a cell phone. Or you could put your phone in Airplane mode
I wrote the article, but I didn't write it *for* The Guardian. They picked it up and syndicated it, as did Gizmodo ( http://gizmodo.com/why-the-wor... ), but the original is still on my blog: http://blog.emacsen.net/blog/2...
The database is under a Free license, there are minutely dumps of the database, all the code is FLOSS, and there are instructions on how to set it up.
That, and there's a Foundation behind it and the project has been around nearly a decade.
What you want, then, is a Coleco ADAM.
If you booted the ADAM up without a game cartridge, it loaded up its word processor, and you could print to the attached printer.
If you had a casette tape in the machine when it booted- it would run the casette.
And if you had a game cartridge in during boot time, you could play the game.
I guess it's good they're doing charity, but it's just so creepy.
The issue isn't equipment, it's storage and bandwith.
If you collect a small city's worth of data, you'll have quite a lot of images. Maybe only a terabyte, if you're lucky, but probably several terabytes. Now extend that to an entire state/province, or a small country. You'll quickly be racking up terabytes and pedabytes of data.
"No problem, storage is cheap." you might be thinking, but storage gets expensive as you increase the demands of the storage. All of this storage needs to be available immediately, so it can't be stored on near time storage devices, which might make it less expensive. And it must be stored in such a way that makes it redundant in case of hardware failure, so either using disk, or system level data replication.
And now that you've stored the data, you need to serve it to users. Pushing out a small amount of data to a user isn't a problem. 2 cents a gigabyte seems cheap. But if you need to serve a whole country worth of data, with tens or hundreds of thousands of users, you now hit bandwidth issues- bandwith caps, and overage costs. Getting a larger pipe to the user costs more money, and deals that seemed reasonable start to become very expensive very quickly.
You'd quickly start talking about needing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just to store the data, and then hundreds of thousands (or more) to serve it out.
Commercial organizations are not going to be inclined to put money towards something when they don't have to, and the burden on users would be incredibly high.
Is it still wrong?
It can take a while for the geocoder to pick up on issues.
Also, if you put a note on your area and link to it, I can take a look.
Addresses are particularly tricky for a variety of reasons that I won't bore you with, but could make your head spin.
You're right that there is a need to make addresses easier to work with, but in 99% of cases, you can just draw the building and tag it with the address and all should be good.
When you say "the result doesn't change"- can you elaborate exactly what you mean?
Addresses are quite difficult to get right (no one gets them right, not even the guys with billions of dollars to spend).
You can get a lot of help with these kinds of issues on the mailing lists, help.osm.org, the IRC channel, or the web forums. And depending on where you are, you may even have a local group of mappers to help you. So you have a community to help you through any editing issues you might encounter.
If you look at OpenStreetMap's maps of North Korea in comparison to Google, you see that the OSM maps are of much higher quality, as well as being Free (unlike Google MapMaker):
http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/?mt0=mapnik&mt1=googlemap&lon=125.7375&lat=39.03865&zoom=12
Someone should show this video to these elderly folks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb2Pzl1U0sY
> you are doing an AWESOME job.
I don't speak for the project. I'm just a contributor, just like if I were a Wikipedia contributor.
> May be you could suggest the "free-as-in-beer users" of OSM to to add a sponsor link to their search engine.
I don't know what a sponsor link to a search engine is, but the license dictates usage, and everyone is in full compliance with the license.
> For instance, I find fairly difficult to edit maps in open street map, but if there was a good interface to allow the user to report back to OSM that an information is wrong with a descriptive text might help mappers that know how to edit the maps to correct them.
This question has multiple answers, so let me try my best to address them:
1) If you're interested in learning more about OSM, I highly recommend joining the newbies list. It's very low traffic and very high quality.
2) Personally, I think most mapping in OSM isn't that hard (sometimes it is but not usually). Maybe if you explained what you found hard, we could work on that?
3) The suggestion for textual feedback back to OSM is already in the works for the new website, which will hopefully be up later this year. I think that's the bridge between mappers and non-mapping contributors you're asking about.
> it just doesn't contain the terms that (apparently) the developer would like
No.... It's a term that the article of this slashdot blurb doesn't like. We in the project (including me, the person who is being paraphrased) have no issue with anyone making money off the project.
> without any acknowledgement or payment to the origin of the product is just immoral,
Acknowledgement is attribution, and attribution is part of the license. And the license is being followed.
As for payment... there is no obligation for that. Would it be nice? Sure. But it's not required.
> Who is making that accusation?
Probably the same guy whose voting my comment down clarifying things I was quoted on in the original article.
I want to make a few clarifications to the article.
1. This was, as Roblimo points out, a Facebook chat. This wasn't an interview and I didn't know it was going to be the subject of an article. I was having a conversation with a friend, but when friends are reporters... well mea culpa.
2. Bing is not doing evil here. They are in full compliance with the license as far as I know. And they have expressed interest in offering the project help in the future. I stated a fact, which is that nothing concrete has some out yet, but that's not quite the same "they don't give back.". It's my hope that they will do something for the project, but they're not required to.
3. Lots of companies use OpenStreetMap to make money. There's nothing wrong with that. And many of the same individuals who make money off OSM are its biggest supporters in terms of spreading the word, in terms of helping support the OpenStreetMap Foundation, and by going out and mapping their neighborhoods. There's no separation in my mind between these people and other contributors.
4. The license is essentially attribution-sharealike. It's like the GPL. If there's modification of our data, they're required to make it available to others under the same terms as they received it. That's the license, and that's what everyone is following.
I want to make sure this confusion is cleared up, and if there are any other impressions that are wrong based on this article, I want to apologize for them.
- Serge
And it wasn't new when I wrote the article...
Besides everything else people have said about duplication of effort, there's also a number of "on the fence" people like myself.
Sirius has several stations I want, but XM has Air America.
My biggest concern with this merger is that, in the end, they won't strive for more diversity, but will decide the market is locked up and cut funding.
I personally would love to see more rebroadcast radio stations from around the world, and more new talent from sources like individual podcasts and small music publishers, but with a locked market, what incentive would an XM/Serius company have to bring that to the air?
I don't think it was purposeful; I think they genuinely hadn't heard of a person wanting a refund back from Windows before. The first person I spoke with on the phone[1] (vs by email[2]) seems a bit hostile to me getting the refund, but the second person (Seema, who I thanked by name at the end) was absolutely interested in helping me, but clearly hadn't heard of anyone else doing this.
One of the reasons I emphasized being polite so much is that it's easy to become frustrated, and thinking that they're doing this specifically to prevent you from getting your refund certainly could make you angry, and that won't help you or the customer service rep.
[1] I wrote the article.
[2] I implied in the article that I was going to help save you time, I wasted a lot of time trying to get my refund by email.
This laptop was purchased through the small business section of Dell and they didn't offer a no-OS option.
They do offer some machines without an OS, but they're PCs and servers.
When I configured the host on Dell's web site, I made sure that it didn't come with any bundled software. The OS was the only thing that you couldn't remove.
I've kept low profile on the Slashdot comments to my article, but I just don't agree with you here.
/always/ been there. Unless you believe in laws like UCITA (which luckily hasn't passed in most states), you could always return your unwanted Windows.
:)
The argument that anyone could return Windows has
I believe that perhaps 1-2% of laptops being sold are running some other operating system than Microsoft Windows (not including those from Apple or Sun). Most people, even now, don't know they can get a Windows refund. Of those who do know, many figure that it's too time consuming and not worth the time.
If you don't think it's worth the time, then that's perfectly okay.
But if you don't have to spend $50 on something you didn't want, I think it's worth it.
My intention in writing the article was to reduce the time it took to get your refund. If you can streamline the process from 2 hours (which is about what I spend in total) to 30-40 minutes, then spending the time/effort seems more reasonable, so maybe more people will do it.
Oh, and I'm 28, not 22.