| |||||||||||||
Free is too expensive (Economist)Free is too expensive (Economist)Posted Apr 3, 2012 0:58 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)In reply to: Free is too expensive (Economist) by wookey Parent article: Free is too expensive (Economist)
Cambridge probably has a lot of students with lots of free time. So it's no wonder that the coverage is great there. It's not so great in other areas, though.
Commercial map providers often use data from official sources, so it's consistent everywhere. Quite often that requires obtaining various government licenses to work with it and/or converting complex formats.
This is not cheap, so applications have to be sponsored somehow. Through ads or maybe through direct sales.
(Log in to post comments)
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 3, 2012 7:25 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] It's not so great in other areas, though. The OpenStreetMap maps for Germany are, by now, widely considered superior to anything available on the commercial map market. Some loose ends need to be tied up but on the whole things are looking not at all bad.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 3, 2012 16:41 UTC (Tue) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
Cambridge is just an example, and in fact most of the initial mapping was done by a man with a job. Most of the UK now has excellent OSM coverage.
Mapping is the canonical example of something that is better crowd-sourced than done commercially. Getting data from official sources is about governments providing data in open formats.
I sometimes wonder why you post here - you don't really seem to believe in the idea of collaborative effort or free software at all. You just keep telling how much better commercial OSes and commercial map providers and massive phone companies are, when the point is that those entities can use and contribute to open data and free software too if they want and we all get better stuff.
Where are these places where the OSM mapping data is poor? I'd expect such places to be getting quite thin on the ground now. Clearly there is more data to add to OSM so that it is good for all purposes (such as motorway lane details for turn-by-turn style nav, speed restrictions) but no doubt that is all ongoing at a rate of knots.
For the last Debconf (in Bosnia and Herzegovina) it was notable that so far as Google or Deutsche Bahn were concerned the place was empty and devoid of roads or trains. OSM had excellent detailed mapping. That seems to be true for many 'lesser' countries where the big providers can't be bothered.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 3, 2012 17:44 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Well, for example, Google Maps show the hotel where I'm staying right now: http://g.co/maps/3xm25 and OSM doesn't. In my home city OSM gives me incorrect address for the US embassy: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=50.460314&lon=30.51...
And so on. I've been burned a couple of times by the OSM, so I won't use it for anything important (like getting from point A to point B in time).
So no, maps are definitely not something I'd trust to Wikipedia-style development. Now, maps based on official geodata with wiki-style corrections would be great. And we actually have it in Russia ("folks' map" by Yandex).
>I sometimes wonder why you post here - you don't really seem to believe in the idea of collaborative effort or free software at all.
I certainly do. Only an idiot would deny the success of the Linux kernel (btw, I hate the combination 'Linux kernel', sounds too much like 'ATM machine').
However, I'm not blind and I can see where the _non-commercial_ community development model fails. It usually fails in tasks that require a lot of drudgery and/or interaction with real users.
Linux kernel by now is not non-commercial, it's developed by for-profit companies as a way to avoid developing their own completely new OS. Besides, Linux is hardly boring at all.
OSM might actually be picked up by companies which need reliable mapping data but which don't want to pay to develop it from scratch and/or license it. That's arguably already happening (Apple is using OSM in one of their products).
But no company bets on Linux desktop right now. And unfortunately, a lot of desktop-related development is very boring stuff. Like keeping compat wrappers for old API or making sure you don't break anything with new updates. So we see the result - a lot of wonderful new development with no regards for backward compatibility and regressions in functionality.
A similar problem - there are no good tax/accounting packages for Linux. Just our favorite grumpy editor.
|
|||||||||||||