And improving OSM _feels_ great in my experience. It's actually and primarily helping the open-source community.
Google really incentivizes users to fix map data (like business info) and, after doing so, shows you popups like "Your change was seen by 10,000 people!". Really good UX. Yet, I was only doing free work for a mega corp which doesn't feel as satisfying (and I stopped doing so).
My feelings exactly. I first got drawn to editing OSM instead of Waze because of local Waze volunteers acting like mini dictators (locking the map for people under a certain level, leading to inaccuracies like wrongly labelled construction in my own street which I could see with my own eyes but could not edit), not being an unpaid worker for Alphabet was a nice bonus and the reason I stayed in the long run.
Currently running virtual machines:
* Home Assistant (https://home-assistant.io/) - with USB passthrough of USB stick to read out my digital electricity/gas meters, Zigbee and Z-Wave
* Homebridge (to allow my Eufy video doorbell to work with Homekit)
* Pihole
All are running from iSCSI storage served by my Synology NAS.
I am running an older Pi (3) on demand in my garden as a client for my media server to play music on garden speakers.
For cheap virtual machines/virtual private servers there’s options beyond the $5/ish a month at Digital Ocean/Vultr:
* many of them offer starting credits for new accounts
* lowendbox often has offers for VMs as cheap as $20 a year
* Scaleway Stardust is super cheap as well. The web interface never shows them in stock, but I have always been able to create them via their CLI tool.
What will definitely help is look for a community (there’s multiple great subreddits that are welcoming to beginners). Don’t be afraid to ask questions, even if they may sound obvious. That’s the best way to learn!
One way I’ve approached this is that I’ve stopped being an unpaid worker for the mega corps… so rather than submitting corrections to Google/Waze/Apple maps I try to use OpenStreetMap consistently and provide as much data as I can. (Such as opening hours of nearby shops.)
I know that companies use this data as the basis for commercial offerings and I am completely fine with that, but I know that the data will always be available for free as well. As a side note, in general I’ve found the local OSM community to be much nicer than the local Waze admins.
> I’ve stopped being an unpaid worker for the mega corps… I try to use OpenStreetMap consistently and provide as much data as I can
That’s a good thing and I like your framing. By contrast, the article frames this as you being tricked into it by the commercial companies to which you previously directly provided data but that’s just nonsense. You weren’t tricked, and you aren’t a victim. I’m glad OpenStreetMap is there to provide the same value with open data but the closed systems still provided value and did not coerce or trick anyone.
> but the closed systems still provided value and did not coerce or trick anyone.
I disagree. Google et al very much trick people into thinking they are helping "the community" by contributing to their databases. They even tell people how "popular" they are because their reviews were included in searches. Do you think as many people would contribute if they were honest about it and said "help make our ads more valuable"?
> trick people into thinking they are helping "the community" by contributing to their databases
The only way that would be a trick is if they were helping the app owner while not making the app more valuable to the community which is obviously not the case. Clearly the voluntary contributors are adding value to the app and are therefore helping the community who uses the app.
> Do you think as many people would contribute if they were honest about it and said "help make our ads more valuable"
Their business models have been public this whole time, hence our discussion, none of this has been a secret. The mere fact that companies tend to paint everything about their operations in the best light possible instead of the opposite is not evidence of trickery or even morally culpable deception.
> The mere fact that companies tend to paint everything about their operations in the best light possible instead of the opposite is not evidence of trickery or even morally culpable deception.
We definitely differ in opinion there. I don't know why people think companies can get away with things that humans never would.
I just don't get the mindset of 'companies are evil, it's how it has to be'. Because it doesn't.
They didn't need to trick anyone. They withheld knowledge.
Every tech company agreed they could do whatever they wanted with user created data and the user had no rights over that data.
No user was informed of the full extent of the consequences of agreeing to use new tech... or allowed to alter the 'agreement' tech companies offered the user.
The 'trick' was hiding sales tactics that were illegal in traditional businesses, behind TOS, EULAs and unregulated internet space.
We all know deep down inside that no man would agree to what big tech did, so the deal was made unintelligble to the user.
They didn't trick you anymore than Facebook didn't trick people into being a free social media service. People elect to post data and never took away explicit permissions to use that data in other ways. FB isn't the government so 4th amendment rights would not apply.
But that's an edge case tbh. Hearing of scrapers ignoring Robots.txt and going after copyright show that they couldn't care less about ethical scraping. They more than overstepped their bounds in some places.
This is the way. Just make sure the project is using a copyleft licence such as ODbL (as used by OSM) or GPL (as used by GNU/Linux and other software projects). Corporations will take as much as they can and give back as little as they can, as a rule.
Someone in the OSM community coined the term "crowd serfing" to describe stuff like contributing to Google Maps for free.
Lawsuits incoming then? If they aren't already happening. That France ruling from not too long ago should deter many companies from ignoring such licenses.
They're happening, but it's not as clear cut as Microsoft ignoring the license. GPL doesn't say anything about AI explicitly. Personally I think Microsoft is in the wrong anyway.
I think you have convinced me to use OSM more for local stuff. I have added notes and updates here and there, but I've never really used it nearly as much as I have apple maps (and used to use google maps/waze). I do know the area quite well so there's not much to lose by using OSM apps instead. I'm still a little mehhhh on longer road trips though, but I'm a pretty conservative user of apps if my current apps are working well for me.
But you're contributing to HN which is owned by VCs with increasingly aggressive political postures (which we are not allowed to discuss on here) who could pull the rug on us whenever they want to.
The problem is that the n^2 stickiness of social graphs makes competition impossible when they scale into the millions. All the value is created by the users but accrues to the network owners, and then the owners are able to abuse and manipulate the networks as they see fit without repercussion. I think the ideal model for social networks is that they would be owned by benevolent nonprofits, but besides wikipedia VCs were able to capture every important social network of the Web 2.0 era.
HN isn't making any money off me, last I checked. And, as owners, the First Amendment gives them the right to publish or not on their own platform for any reason or for no reason. The alternative to this is too horrible to contemplate.
Re paragraph 2, yes. Mastodon largely fits your description of the ideal model, I think.
It went from DIY open source to something more like the UK's model; in fact Canada is running with a number of UK-origin projects & ideas, like Notify, which is of course a good thing, we should all learn from each other's best practices and innovations.
But nothing on OSM is "up-to-the-minute". Many OSM data consumers are months behind OSM discourages putting anything temporary on the map. While I do add OSM business hours including public holidays a lot, this isn't always possible when businesses don't have pre-planned holiday schedules.
Google does seem to have the upper hand for special cases like public holidays sometimes, but even those can be added in OSM.