Re:The rise of OpenStreetMap: A quest to conquer Google’s ma...
by javajosh on Saturday March 01, 2014 @01:29PM
(#7325438)
>some of us despise the companies that attempt to profit from selling I.P.
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.
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.