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But they are contributing back, that's the point of the article right?

So much so the article is more about who controls the organisation.

I personally see this mostly as a good thing. More data, better data, and everyone gets value out of it: users and corporations. Surely it's a sign this project is doing things right.

However I think it's right that the article points at the power structure of this organisation, I think now more than ever it's important it remains independent.

> But they are contributing back

Sometimes they are not contributing. There have been complaints about contractors employed by the big firms adding non-existent roads, tagging roads wrongly, etc. The concern is that because the big firms are so big and now have power over OSM governance, they can simply ignore all those community members who are noticing their persistent mistakes and asking them to stop.

This seems to imply that the corporate members are inserting these mistakes on purpose. I am not convinced this is the case, as I do not see how they could benefit from creating bad maps.

It is not that they are inserting the mistakes on purpose, but rather the contractors actually doing the edits are not responding to changeset comments saying "Hey, you've been persistently making a tagging error with regard to X, could you please stop?" The big corporate members are so big and powerful, they don't care if their contractors are sometimes violating OSM etiquette and failing to work together with other members of the community.

Can bad mappers be banned? Or is the net value positive even if theyale some errors?

If you ban the account of one employee of a contractor, that employee can just make a new account, or the contractor company can give that employee another account to edit from.

but this is trivially true of all contributing accounts to OSM, right?

But this time someone's salary depends on it, it is not just fly-by vanadlism for fun. They will be more persistent in staying active as mapper.

Rather than continually getting their accounts banned, wouldn't it be easier for them to eventually start responding to the OSM etiquette?

It is presumed that sometimes they don’t respond to changeset comments because they aren’t proficient in English (or the local language of whatever country they are mapping remotely).

Why assume that? Maybe there's a bug in their internal software, and it's cheaper to create a program that checks if you're banned and automatically creates a new account, than it is to fix their internal problem.

Hobbyists who keep getting their changes reverted and their account banned will eventually give up, especially if they're not actively trying to harm the project.

But a contractor who's paid for their work, even if it's not very good? They'll just keep going so they don't lose their job.

Hobbyists driven by passion tend to evaluate their work on quality. Contractors mostly evaluate on quantity, especially if their pay depends on such quantity.

It is like open source debate. Contributing back could either mean hiring/giving massive sponsorships to the core contributors, or it could mean giving out scraps. A couple meaningless lines of code here and there and the corporate sponsor gets to pretend they have fulfilled their social responsibility. The bulk of the labour is still born by those who toiled for years without material reward.

the complaint seems to be less about anything practical, and more about how you used to get a warm fuzzy feeling from contributing your data to a scrappy upstart, and now that OSM has achieved such success and is being used by so many companies, the warm fuzzy feeling has gone away.

not sure that's really a problem that needs solving.

Remember when Ubuntu started commercialising Debian?

> And not a whiff that they are contributing back in substantial ways on the whole either

How have you achieved this conclusion when the entire article is about how corporations are contributing back, and the fear that those contributions might cause the devaluation of volunteer contributions? There’s even half a dozen visualisations to demonstrate the extent of their contributions.

I should clarify: I don’t mean just material code contributions but other contributions too, like monetary, data, being receptive to the community about contributions offered and such. Respecting the ethos is more in line with what I’m talking about

It’s a tussle, because I personally came away that the ethos of the community isn’t being respected and the fear is they’ll overrun the mission of the organization.

It’s complicated and nuanced to be sure., which is why I amended my original comment

In my experience, it’s not even the ethos of the whole community, it’s the ethos of a few old guard European dudes. Ask nearly any mapper from say Southeast Asia what they think of corporate contributions and I think you get a different answer.

There’s some truth in that, but famously the first corporate mapping flare-up in OSM was when Facebook utterly screwed up Thailand.

>Conversely the cost of things like Google Maps (as a service not as a consumer in this context) has risen dramatically so naturally big companies are turning to the free offering more and more and the worry is they will have outsized impact in the project and become the dominant body and their priorities will be pushed forward over others

I don't know if this has changed with newer versions of the google maps API, but years ago when I had the choice of using google maps or OSM, the biggest motivator in my decision, when OSM was still a lot less complete, was to do with Google's licensing.

There was a clause that implied they'd have some rights to reproduce and use our data and that was totally unacceptable for our use case. OSM was completely free to use without worries that google was somehow going to be able to use our data in some way.