The real issue is geocoding and business listings. That's the primary user interface to getting your mapping endpoints for most people, and frankly, Google Maps is far and above most other services in this regard. Street View is indispensable for many tasks. I often use it to get a visual cue of the place I'm looking for, especially if it's a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, or to map out where I'm going to park if it's in a city.
See: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Piste_Maps
And something from the area you posted: http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/216074683
It has the huge ski areas in the Alps - I noticed the new "Vertical Experience" run at Meribel in the 3V which I'll need to add to the To Do list.
What it lacks is a service that extracts the data, makes it searchable and has ratings etc.
The UK is maybe the best case for OSM, unsurprisingly since it started there and has the most concentrated community there. There is barely any stone unmapped in the country, and stones that move get updated within days. France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland are also very well covered.
Use the slider at the top.
your OSM url : 48.2509 x 16.2533
your GM url : 48.256541 x 16.269420
Most people think that Google Maps is based only on camera-equipped vehicles and satellite imagery. In fact, the service relies heavily on crowdsourcing.
People who live in remote regions can use Google Maps' community tools to describe how roads, trails, etc., have changed. For example, when the post office in my small town moved, I edited Google Maps to reflect that change. You can also change the position of roads, trails and other geographic elements.
Millions of people regularly improve Google Maps because doing so makes it easier for them to commute and find local resources.
The lesson was clear: you contribute to proprietary databases at your great peril. People access Google Maps at the whim of Google. They could decide tomorrow to deny access, and you'd have no say in the matter.
So, contribute to Open Street Maps instead!
On one hand, we're a community of people who found and contribute to software businesses. Most of these companies depend on selling intellectual property in the form of code and data.
Yet, as makers or hackers, some of us despise the companies that attempt to profit from selling I.P. We expect that all components of software be free for us to tinker with and repurpose.
"Well...wait a minute," one might say, "There doesn't have to be a dichotomy between totally closed and totally open."
Exactly! That's precisely what Google is trying to achieve with its mapping initiative. The firm is investing heavily in community tools (not to mention SDKs for developers) that give us an opportunity to participate: posting, querying and modifying data.
Being both entrepreneurs and makers, we should be a little more realistic about our relationship with IP. You can't always have your cake and eat it, too.
OSM, along with its cousins-in-spirit projects Wikipedia and Libre Software are not about hacking on software. They are about building a society.
A society where no one has to depend on someone else. A society where everyone can learn and share with its co-citizens.
The number one foundation for building this society is that data be:
* accessible without needing explicit authorization,
* modifiable without needing explicit authorization,
* shareable with anyone without needing explicit authorization
in short, what the Free Software definition [0] does for software, but generalized to knowledge (for Wikipedia) or geographical position (for OSM).
By using and (worse !) contributing to Google Maps, you don't build this society. You trust Google to do it; but that's not the reason why Google exists, so you can't be sure about that. Plus, if you recall not-so-old history, you must remember how easy it is for Google to unplug applications even if they are used.
Google is giving you great, shiny toys to play with. But you can only build the present with them. I'd rather trust the future in a Foundation than in a company whose goal is to make money.
Such missions have a strong tendency to end in failure, death, or both.
How about a less grandiose goal like "making software better and more accessible"
You could draw a parallel with ecology. 50 years ago, no one would care about the environment; resources were basically free, pollution was seen as "minor". A world were everyone cared about the planet was seen as utopian. After half a decade of fights, the minds have now switched to a different mind (at least in the western world): pretty much every single piece of electronic hardware you can buy has some notion of "we-are-green" to it. While it's not 100% eco-friendly (just take a look at how electronics are "recycled"), people's mind certainly have changed. The guys behind the Libre software movement certainly don't expect anything big happening in the next 10 years (remember that RMS has been fighting for the last 30 years), but things will change, you can be sure of it. Just take a look at the recent plans to to "take control back" on the internet infrastructures initiated by Europe and Brazil. Sure, technically the things will more or less remain the same; but the mindset is changing, and it will keep spreading.
> How about a less grandiose goal like "making software better and more accessible"
This is a really noble goal in itself, and Google can be praised as one of the biggest enablers in this field, seeing how much they have changed the domain. While I may not sound like it, I actually thank them for all they did to the tech world, and the end-users in general (with an extraordinary amount of stuff available as OSS). Actually, that goal is more or less what OSS tries to achieve, except that the target is not the end user but the developer: the goal is to make sure that developers don't reinvent the wheel again and again and again.
But that goal is orthogonal to what the Libre movement (FSF, OSM, Wikipedia) fights for. That goal can very well be accomplished with private companies: in the majority of cases, they help society by building better and more accessible "things", because that's a sure way to make money (with the notable exception of US telcos), and money is what they're here for. But that doesn't mean you are independent; it's quite the contrary in fact, because their tool is so easy and powerful to use that you just use them. This is what many people call a walled garden: you can live in a complete ecosystem, where everything works perfectly together... but once you start wandering around, you quickly realize that there are boundaries to what you can do [0]. The tech world is even worse than this description, because everything can change in 10 years; you can't expect all your belongings to remain accessible at the end of your lifetime.
The FSF doesn't want to build better software. There even was a post recently mocking their logos. They want to build software so that you don't need to depend on anyone else. If you don't depend on anyone else, you can do whatever you want.
[0] http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/11/i-dont-want-to-be-part-of-yo...
If I despised Google, or any company that profits from selling IP, I would have said so.
If you can either contribute to an open dataset or a closed one, you contribute to the open one because the benefit no longer relies on the goodwill of any dataset owner. This principle underlies not only Open Street Maps, but OSS in general, and with a little finagling, things like Bitcoin. If the last few years have taught us anything, it's that we cannot rely on the basic decency of any institution.
I'm not happy about it. I wish I could trust institutions to be decent. But time and again they act indecently, and weather the (short) media storm, and keep going, business as usual, and we must protect ourselves from that. To do otherwise is to ignore the lessons of the past.
(I can totally see submitting a change to get rid of an annoyance; I don't get warm fuzzies from 'helping Google make maps a better product'.)
Why should we trust Google with this data? Why should we supply google with this data when open alternatives exist? Will their incentives in using this data always be aligned with ours? You don't have to despise Google or want all things to be totally open to ask these questions. You don't have to be hostile to IP or companies selling IP to decide it is more in your interest to contribute to an open project.
I'd rather contribute data to an open project and watch a thousand mapping projects bloom (including Google's) based on that data, than help a corporation like Google or Apple take over every corner of our digital lives. OSM has led to a lot of great mapping services based on their data, and no-one resents those.
It'd be wonderful to see a similar open web search project based on open data too.
Being both entrepreneurs and makers, we should be a little more realistic about our relationship with IP. You can't always have your cake and eat it, too.
With large corporations, the cake is a lie.
For example, I wanted to use google in a commercial application, but only for backend services like geocoding and place search. I wanted to pay them for these services, but they refused the business because I did not want to display the data on a google map and use the google js api.
That is the sort of thing a company with lots of leverage can do. I wanted to pay full price or more to use a feature (10s of thousands per year), but due to a monopoly on the data, they can turn me away. Sorry, but I already have to deal with one Comcast.
Why not? We can always demand more, and what is wrong with that? And if we set out to make and eat that cake, chances are we can do it. It is not unrealistic at all. So far crowdsourcing has worked really well for many projects, and I can only see it getting bigger as we as a community realize the potential of open data and our ability to collect & manage it in numbers that few companies can afford to challenge.
The point made by GP is a perfectly valid one, and many of us have been screwed in some way or another by corporations that hold the keys. I do not see why playing along with such schemes has anything to do with being realistic.
>That's precisely what Google is trying to achieve with its mapping initiative. The firm is investing heavily in community tools (not to mention SDKs for developers) that give us an opportunity to participate: posting, querying and modifying data.
So is OpenStreetMap, Navteq(commercial again) [2] and other mapping companies. Atleast Navteq/Nokia allows you to download complete offlline maps for their Here maps on supported devices unlike Google which wants to force people to be online for tracking/advertising purposes.
[1] http://digiday.com/platforms/google-tracking/
[2] https://mapreporter.navteq.com/#dashboard
[3] http://blog.dynamoo.com/2013/10/google-ads-and-fff7ed-whats-...
If I was a shady business, you can imagine how I can mark all the roads in front of competitor as closed. Or I can mark the streets in such a way that traffic gets routed to go in front of my business.
Most of the edits that I have made have been for areas where I'm interested in walking paths, because I use the Maps API quite a lot, but going out of my way to map a city or something, I'd rather do that on OSM where it's free for all.
It seems a little strange because I'd assume mapping Vienna, one of the world's more well known cities, would be of high importance. I wonder if they're now avoiding Austria on purpose, simply to send a message.
Edit: It looks like the ban was lifted in 2011. Three years later, and there's still no street view in Austria. I'm scratching my head on this one.
I do not live in Austria, but, in my opinion, this does not seem an entirely unreasonable reaction to that discovery. (Incidentally, I think I would be in favor of laws controlling the massive untargeted acquisition of information in public space, for privacy reasons... and I would not mind at all if this meant there was no Street view coverage in my country; quite the contrary.)
A little perspective is nice.
(That said, a3_nm's post indicates that this case had more to do with Google's collection of private data over WiFi than the photographs themselves. It's hypocritical for governments in the age of Snowden to criticize a private company for doing that, but at least it's understandable.)
Google's web-based tool is much slower, and the dependency-chain approval process can make what should be a quick edit into a multi-day process. [1]
One example is a local park's hiking trails which are closed to cycling traffic. I'm do a lot of local biking and regularly use Google Maps to plot routes, so when I saw that the hiking trails had been somehow marked as cycling routes (which Google was directing people along!) I went to change them. Two hours later and I still wasn't done with simply unflagging two square miles of hiking trails.
Had this been in a JOSM-like interface it'd be 15 minutes at most, including committing the change back.
I understand that Google doesn't want to make changing things too easy, lest there be all manner of vandalism and personal-motive edits, but it's currently hard enough that those of us serious about making substantive changes have the tools getting in our way.
Google created something great with google maps. But I'll always feel like it's there to be consumed, not to be part of.
[0] http://open.mapquest.com/ [1] Well, check the terms at http://developer.mapquest.com/web/products/open/map
EDIT: That said, I have great luck with using something like OSMAnd+ to have offline sets of data that I'd contributed to. It works very nicely for electronic mapping of MTB trails.
Do you have any ideas why? Did google simply deem it not profitable enough to send their camera-vans round bratislava, or are there particular reasons that make it more expensive there (regulations of some kind, a fuck-tonne of bureaucracy to get permission?)
Google never had any real super high quality detail in my tiny home town. When I first got into OSM, I did what lots of people do: I filled in a bunch of details I know about where I grew up. Kind of fun. Well a month or so later, I checked out Google maps and, lo and behold, their data was much better for that little town. It was NOT the OSM edits I made--they didn't steal anything. But I found it odd that they'd all of a sudden take interest in a little town of less than 1500 people in the middle of nowhere. I don't know. It could have been a coincidence--It's possible they had a big world-wide map update during that month that updated everything.
Oh, and it RAISES the question, not "begs" the question.
It's more self-explanatory, for one, and is less misused in the vernacular.
"You are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt our data, as long as you credit OpenStreetMap and its contributors. If you alter or build upon our data, you may distribute the result only under the same licence. The full legal code explains your rights and responsibilities."
If so, that's very nice but I am not sure that's what is actually happening: the third-party source whom they are licensing data from is unlikely to be happy with a scenario where their data ends up in the public domain as this considerably reduces the commercial value of their map data.
But Apple simply cannot force someone else's data into the public domain, if they were mixing the data without permission, they would be violating the licenses and legal action could force them to fix that (but it wouldn't directly change the licensing of any of the data)
The OSM fan in me thinks that eventually Google Maps will be based on OSM. :)
Either a bit a fraction of a percent of a days profit or some data for OSM, sure either would be most acceptable.
OSM: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/48.2509/16.2533
Google Maps: https://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q...