Apple doesn't contribute back? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18913408

> Apple employee spoke at a recent OSM conference. Yes, they use OSM data as well. In some countries more than others. Apple also has a fulltime staff working on OSM. https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/issues, https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/

I asked a friend at Apple and there are apparently like 15 people working on it, which is a $2-3M contribution.

Apple is replacing OSM and all other sources with its own private maps. https://www.justinobeirne.com/new-apple-maps/

That article is not remotely the whole story.

Apple uses OSM data in many parts of the world where their own mapping efforts will likely never reach.

Mr O’Beirne’s articles are very US-centric.

> Apple uses OSM data in many parts of the world where their own mapping efforts will likely never reach.

And contributes nothing to those, instead opting to build their own maps in the important markets.

Apple does pay people to make edits to OSM: https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/

Only in markets where it matters, which means they will stop making those edits after they replace OSM with their own maps.

O'Beirne's article is US-centric because Apple's rollout is US-centric (California, Nevada, and Hawaii only for now).

Unfortunately, that’s the deal with open source - you have to expect that people will use your work in ways you may not like. License your stuff accordingly.

AIUI, Freebase was not "shuttered" - it was used to seed Wikidata, a Wikipedia sister project which makes its data available under permissive CC0 licensing.

It was shuttered. You can no longer contribute to Freebase. Wikidata used some data from the last Freebase triples dump, but Google is not contributing its updates to either, despite using Freebase's crowdsourced work to seed its internal knowledgebase.

Once again, I understand the profit motive. I just don't like it.