But the future will raise the bar. Perhaps we'll see wiki of wikis, or something else getting the web closer to truly semantic knowledge.
”We should respect freedoms and not restrict them arbitrarily… except when I do not like the people using those freedoms.“
It is always a weird take to me. Pick a license that matches your preferences, like the GPL. Do not pick MIT/whatever and then complain when corps make use of the freedoms you afforded them.
But you can also take a noncommercial GPL software, slightly modify and put your logo and name on it, do some marketing and get cash out of it without contributing anything significant. You just can't make it proprietary. But it's still an unfair situation.
If you don't want your software used commercially, don't Open Source (or Free Software) it. Maybe a CC-NC license if you want to give it away for noncommercial use.
The rest of us will continue to use and make OSS and enjoy it without worrying about what others are doing with it.
But the GPL goes even further than that, and this appears to be the source of your confusion. The GPL stops people redistributing the software under terms that would restrict or prohibit use, including commercial use. The GPL guarantees that anyone receiving the software now or in the future has the same rights you have.
Someone can absolutely fork your software and use it commercially. That's what FOSS is about: You shall not limit what other people can do with the software.
You may however restrict others from putting restrictions on derivative works of your software. That's what the GPL is all about. You enforce reciprocity and ensure that all works based on your software allow the user the essential freedoms of free software.
(Alternately, Google for people trying to get the full sourcecode to their Android phones from Samsung and see how difficult it can be).
Many human problems could be solved if humans were less willing to compromise with greedy people, but unfortunately authors are too nice in general to do that.
What does stick in the craw with many of us, however, is that Meta, Mapbox, and various other bigcos have nonetheless decided to disregard the attribution requirements of what is a fairly permissive licence, simply because they're sufficiently big that they can say to the OSM Foundation (annual turnover about £3.27) "suck it, we dare you to sue us".
It’s the same thing with freedoms
> younger generations raised on corporate platforms and their phone apps are less aware of non-corporate alternatives
All the new guys I work with are trapped in the app store/play store bubble. If it's not available directly through the device's software distribution system it's not getting used.
> might even be suspicious of libre and altruistic movements
All my boomer bosses think that anything that is outside the Windows/O365 ecosystem, or doesn't come with a $150 yearly license, is clearly pirate hacker software that will give your e-mail a virus and steal your bitcoin.
It is increasingly frustrating when we have a problem that could be fixed with GNU corutils and a bash script, or a raspberrypi/arduino translating between 2 serial devices, but we end up getting some $1500 black box from the 'official' vendor. It teaches the newer guys that step one is not to think about the problem, it's to grab your wallet and call a salesman.
</tangent>
It's the whole reason management consultancies exist. If Deloite tell you to do X, or Gartner say buy Y, and you do, you aren't going to have the blame. Even when you end up losing half a billion as our last CxO did, you'll just get a golden handshake and a move to another company.
Turn it all off, bury it in concrete, toss the concrete in a river and hurl the river into space, and maybe then IT will be happy with the security.
I understand your frustration but I’ve given up fighting with IT and just let them sort it out
Of course, all the software in the distro repo is there because somebody went against this tendency.
I get why people might not be motivated to join us in the tragedy of the commons.
Then the project loses visibility to end users. I don't know if that is worth the occasional commercial contributions from them to satisfy their own requirements.
This post box is no longer there. "I'll drive round and check", "no need I'm stood there, it has gone". "I'll drive round tomorrow"...I got the impression i was on someone else's patch and gave up
But with regard to bodies of water, there are systems that monitor OSM and warn if someone has tried to "move them to the right place". These details were often added to OSM from professionally surveyed maps, so they are in the right place. However, ordinary people's consumer GPS is typically a few meters off, and they end up moving things to the inaccurate coordinates on their screens.
Meanwhile, the Dutch community also imports all official addresses, but there the tool simply allows for these to be used with other OpenStreetMap tags. It makes you wonder about the Danish approach.
Anecdotally, I’ve had a lot of experiences like this with newer generations of people on topics like open source software or community projects: They’ve been trained, usually by a social media niche, to believe that the only good fight is to actively harm corporations. Their idea of the world is a very clear black and white contrast with people on one side and corporations on the other.
Such a clean separation of the world only exists in ideas they get from social media and movies. Encountering a project like OSM or an open source project where the largest users (and for OSS, maybe the largest contributors) are people involved with corporations doesn’t fit into their worldview, so they file it in the “corporate” side of the divide and dislike it.
However on the other hand, it has been drilled into your head repeatedly that wanting compensation for work is "bad" and antithetical to social movements. You work for the whole, not for yourself. Besides, you (along with everyone else) gets to enjoy the fruits of others free work.
But then after dwelling on it, you realize that 90% of the people holding you to this ideology aren't contributing much if anything at all, and just gorging themselves on the work of a few.
So now you either consolidate power into your hands (nazi mods), lose motivation (project decays), or become an "evil" capitalist(start charging money for access).
You can be compensated by "gorging" on other open-source that you haven't contributed to, working outside OSS, or asking for funding to keep working or work more. But if you work privately, you're competing against someone who will work publicly, while limiting someone else who would like to use your private work but can't afford it (like you can't afford others).
You never hear about them but there are also invitation only communities where contributing is required. The benefits are not shared outside.
Any ideology built on this premise is doomed to failure. Successful movements are ones that align the particular interests of individuals with the broader goals of the community.
Dogmas that set individual interest and public interest at odds with each other will always debilitate the effectiveness of the entire movement, and subject it to never-ending internal conflict.
The free software/open source ecosystem has successfully demonstrated how public-interest idealism and for-profit commercial pursuits can not just coexist, but actually complement and reinforce each other. Anyone who's arguing for one side of the ecosystem in opposition to the other is asking for the entire thing to collapse.
This is something I've noticed as well.
- Movies made after WWII that needed villians often made them Nazis.
- During the cold war, evil villians were communists or Soviet spies.
- Movies made after the fall of the Soviet Union often make their villians evil faceless corporations.
A generation or two has been raised by Hollywood and Disney on business always being evil, while simultaneoulsy choosing to consume and make themselves dependent on giant corporate content.
It’s fascinatingly devilish, isn’t it? They control the outrage and profit from it. I’m reminded of Bill Hicks’ bit on marketing.
We’ve been very lucky that the incentive structure has them doing a lot of useful things for us, but that doesn’t mean we have to be happy about having so much of our lives being ruled by these amoral aliens.
Oh hollywood and disney, not the behaviour of Standard Oil, DeBeers, Nestle, Coca Cola, banks in the sub-prime mortgage crisis, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, OPEC, DuPont, Chemie Grünenthal, predatory gambling and payday loans companies, an "epidemic" of wage theft in America estimated in the tens of billions per year, the trends towards enshittification, nickel-and-diming, rent-extraction and grifting of most products and services over time, health insurance companies, the lived experience of millions of workers being devalued, insulted, subject to unneccesarily dangerous environments, and treated like cattle?
Or maybe they just feel that corporations are actively trying to harm them and this is the logical response?
I don't think that's unfair at this point.
So I don't know that it's fair? Nearly all the material goods around me and a ton of services were provided by corporations, which are largely composed of regular people glued together at scale by bureacracy.
Correction:
Stop buy stuff.
Corporate food products (at least from the US) seem to be designed to just get you to consume more of them.
Free market competition makes sense. Lowest prices.
What we see right now in the USA, though, is a mafia. That has nothing to do with capitalism as such. It is a racket, a ponzi scheme. There are many variants of capitalism. Even the chinese adapted their variant to sinomarxistic ideals (to certain extent; I don't think today's main China is purely capitalistic nor purely sinomarxistic as it once used to be).
> Capitalists hate capitalism. They don’t want to be exposed to the risks entailed by competition, and feel the goad of that insecurity. They want monopolies, or platforms, or monopoly platforms. They want assets, not businesses.
https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-...
Government intervention is the principal mechanism by which powerful participants restrain other partipants' market activity, and insulate themselves from competition.
Unchecked Capitalism always leads to Mono/Duopolies aka Mafia. The best of both World is maybe called Social-direct-democratic-capitalism.
>What we see right now in the USA, though, is a mafia. That has nothing to do with capitalism as such.
Has everything to do with unchecked Capitalism, go too far and both extremes end in a ~Monopoly, in Socialism/Communism it's mostly the State (China, USSR, Cuba etc.) in Capitalism a massive conglomerate of Enterprises (S.Korea, again "new" China, Russia, USA, India)
But the issue is not about corporations - or companies - per se.
The issue is how they relate to the general population. You can have good corporations and bad corporations. When billionaires buy legislation then something is wrong. When a corrupt elite invades countries and kills people - that's bad.
The problem of "billionaires buying legislation" is that billionaires get money from market activity to buy it with, not that it's up for sale by politicians or that the limits on the scope of legislation are insufficient?
When a military force marches into another country, that's the work of a vague "corrupt elite" and not the political officials in charge of the military?
Shock horror, people tend to care most about things that they feel personally affect them.
Samesame after a while if unchecked, just play cyberpunk 2077 ;)
So even when these people have turned into a broken clock about being anti-corporate to the point that they’re anti-open-projects, someone will always come along to explain why we can’t fault them and instead everything is the fault of corporations. A normal working class person can not be faulted for their beliefs in this model, because every fault will be transformed into something that can be blamed on a corporation.
Personally I find the erasure of individual thought in this model to be demeaning. You can’t blame everything every individual does on corporations having either made them do it or forced them to believe it through their actions. At some point we have to admit that people’s thoughts and actions are their own.
If someone becomes so bitter that they’re becoming anti-OSM or anti-Wikipedia or anti-OSS, I’m fully okay with holding them to account for their chosen beliefs.
> Personally I find the erasure of individual thought in this model to be demeaning.
The fact that you are describing a behavior that you believe to be shared among a sizable group of people seems to contradict your claim that their beliefs are due to individual failings rather than some broader social forces that caused them to believe these things, no?
The historical left/marxist view is essentially: look at someone's social context and where their money comes from, and you'll know how they probably think. The American ideology is: everyone is an individual and a tramp can be a philosopher.
The second is much more appealing to us as individuals, and to our sense of self-determination and independence. And people do have agency---some people succumb to despair, others don't; some work hard, some don't; some rebound from setbacks, some don't.
But if you look at large groups of people, the first one starts to have strong explanatory power. Look at US coverage of foreign elections, and that second view is almost all you see.
I think GP pretty clearly states it's due to broader social forces:
> They’ve been trained, usually by a social media niche
I don't think that was a complicated point, but maybe you think you were asking something else, while trying to still blame whatever "social forces" TikTok has told you to blame.
I’m responding primarily to this sentiment:
> At some point we have to admit that people’s thoughts and actions are their own.
I generally find that placing blame on individuals for views that one believes are wrong is not constructive. Clearly there are reasons that they believe the things that they do, and this is especially true when you disagree not with an individual but with an entire group.
Of course anyone is free to get angry at anyone else for their individual beliefs, and I believe that individually people’s minds can be changed. But blaming individuals _who you have never met_ for behaviors that you are stereotyping from an entire group seems wholly unproductive. This is not going to change the group’s minds, and is only going to make you bitter.
When discussing group behavior, it only makes sense to discuss things that influence the whole group.
The problem isn't "corporations", it's capitalism. The economic system forces corporations to behave in anti-social ways.
Similar goes with the trope you peddle, individuals were to blame. They're not. The system they live in, and never had any say in shaping, forces them to engage in behaviors short term that ultimately run counter to their own interests long term.
Contributing to open source software or commons like Wikipedia definitely is questionable. Those contributions get monopolized and their benefits privatized. That's not a "belief".
Which bits do you object to? The idea that people should be able to form going concerns that outlive any individuals (e.g. investing in the construction of a fishing boat)? That several individuals should be able to share in the risk and profit of such a venture (e.g. a group investing in the construction, and receiving shares of the profit of each catch)? Or that they should be able to hire others on a free market for a wage or share of profits (e.g. hiring a crew for the boat)? Or that if they should have a dispute, there should be a formal, legal, process to resolve it?
The trouble is that there is no human system in which the agents who distribute the resources are perfectly aligned with the agents to whom resources are distributed. This is nowhere more obvious than in the staggering planning, execution, and communication, failures of the Soviet Union. This is a general case of the alignment problem, which is fundamentally unsolved. I would argue that it's un-solvable as long as your agents are living organisms competing in an ecosystem.
As long as niches exist, they will be exploited. Resenting that is akin to resenting the biggest fish in the pond for being so damn aggressive - it's pointless. We live in a pond. We should focus on maintaining the nonviolent and often ecosystem-benefitting nature of our exploitation (since it is hard-won and precarious), rather than resent the inescapable reality of its existence.
Not taking a side in this particular discussion, but this specific sentence looks like a self-fulfilling statement: if people disagree with you, you take it as proof that they are unable to evaluate your claim fairly.
"Or maybe they just feel that organizational methodologies used by people to coordinate complex multi-participant activities are actively trying to harm them and this is the logical response?"
No, it's quite illogical.
A million lines of C supporting 2k lines of declarative unit files is less complex from the user's perspective than 50k lines of custom bash scripts. Of course it would be better if it did the same thing in, say, 100k lines or in Rust, but perfect is the enemy of good. systemd exists today and it works fine.
Everything is regular, predictable, documented and easy to read. A file made for one distro only needs trivial changes to run on another. That's what simple really means. I would never go back to init scripts.
OpenRC, s6, rc.d (the BSD), are more simpler than the systemd ecosystem which is feature ladden and not easy to use on the common line. They are also way easier to hack upon, especially when you want to run a lean system (small vm, containers). systemd feels like running windows server for a small php application. The happy path is easy, anything outside of that is torture.
If indeed, their contributions serve mainly to enrich corporations that then contribute to the subversion of the political system through corruption, anti-democratic measures and so on, that's an entirely reasonable response.
Craft is Wikipedia / OSM for software. We're building an open source AI software factory to agentically remake everything.
We're going to open source all the apps, turn platforms into protocols, build open infra, and help assist open weights.
Everything will be rewritten as high quality open source software. And once we've covered the space of everything people use, we'll turn the components into highly reusable open source libraries that can be reshaped into new workflows in real time.
We're going to make a seamless bridge between local and cloud AI, we're going to make a rich set of primitives for fine tuning and sharing.
Not just applications. Data, infra, hardware, the whole of technology.
I've been around long enough to know that sustained collective enthusiasm can sometimes blindside you.
I took a brief look at the posted projects and quickly surveyed the community behind it and I'm not ready to dismiss them yet. I'm not exactly sold either, but I am going to put them on my radar and check in every few months.
Can you explain how you will resolve the tension between "high quality" without moderation who turn into Reddit "nazi moderators" or StackOverflow meanies, and without turfing out all moderators and turning into 4chan of old, trolling, and low quality overrun with ads and noise?
What social structure, organization, review, moderation, do you think will solve that tension?
The full list is at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Editors
Then please publish it. Others can ask Claude too but it's stupid, and one central repository will have everyone's bugfixes and feature recommendations.
Did you ask for help in the community group for your country?
> That could be fixed easily if there was a convenient app that recorded my driving and uploaded it to a central source, processed it, and converted that into edits for me to confirm.
Mapping requires more than that. GPS traces can be useful in areas where no recent aerial imagery is available, but automated importing of that would cause a lot of errors.
I really wish the world recognized and provided tax income to these projects because they have been the backbone of our ever-complex technological society for probably about thirty years. Rather than what we have now where large corporations will take a foothold in an open-source project and hollow it out for parts then sell it as a "turnkey" product like we have seen time and time again.
It is, however had, true, that the interaction pattern changed. So many walled ghettos about nowadays - look at Facebook and Google (via youtube).
There is quite a lot of open cooperation between national mapping agencies and OpenStreetMap, at least in Europe.
As for updating the name of the latest pop-up shop, the owner will just have to sort it out himself.
Most of my peers in the bicycle-travel community are uninterested in mapping, or even totally unaware of where maps come from. Apps like Komoot became standard tools for cyclists, but only a minority ever learned that such apps' data derives from OSM and anyone can edit it. So, the concerns I mentioned in my original post about getting people involved are valid.
What’s interesting is that most younger people I interact with now have a better idea of what’s possible through crowdsourced collaboration than older people. In the tech world, people who grew up with crowdsourced sites have seen the end state of Stack Overflow and its moderation, or they’ve seen enough controversies around Wikipedia edit wars where controversial topics become battlegrounds to see which moderators can wield the site’s rules more effectively to revert edits they don’t want on the page. On a long enough timeframe, community projects are at high risk of turning into fiefdoms for power hungry moderators.
The younger people grow up seemingly seeing the same things, but having a different experience about what it means. Talk to any younger generation gamer and they’ll have stories about Discord or Minecraft communities collapsing under power tripping moderators. But in the newer world where internet resources are cheap and now that LLMs can help migrate things, they may have established a new Discord or moved the community to a new game server by the end of the week. Their favorite game emulator or other project may have been forked 4 times already and the community will move to another fork again at the first signs of the new maintainer not doing what they like.
It’s not over… “OVER” but it’s sure feeling that we are heading there, though.
I won't post a link here, but check out KamTape.
Good AI contributions are better than lazy crap or trolling from humans, right?
With AI there is an infinite stream of contributions to curate. No human is ever going to volunteer for that, so unless you keep AI contributions very tightly restricted you'll rapidly lose all human contributors. At which point nobody is left to ensure only good contributions get in, so it is only a matter of time before it devolves into a giant pile of crap.
Besides, who's going to pay to run those AIs? Good models aren't free, so you are effectively turning it into a pay-to-win project. You can be absolutely certain that some tech billionaires are going to burn a few million to have "good AI" constantly rewrite their pages the way they want it.
but worse than no contributions at all
> we'll just have to converge on the idea that quality is what matters.
for me it is not changed at all, just that volume of spam increased and it is now harder to detect
I used to contribute to [X] project because it felt good to make something, but realizing that someone is getting a dollar on the back of my work that I am not is just not worth it.
1. the culture of sharing your work 2. the sense of usefulness and purpose
I'm not sure the newest generation share the 1, but in any case LLM companies destroy the 2.
Why would you thanklessly work for free and for the community if your work is pillaged and sold for a lot of money by AI companies before the project even reaches a critical mass ?!
StackOverflow used to be one of the big ones in that area and that is as good as dead. I see the same coming to TVTropes, fandom wikis, movie dbs and Co. once AI gets a good at interpreting video and getting access to some sizable movie libraries. When it comes to /r/tipofmytongue/ style questions AI is already much better than large groups of humans together, though only if the necessary information is available on the public Web.
Lack of access to content outside the Web is really what is hampering progress so far, but that could go away very quickly whenever any of the big players decides to let AI run wild on whatever libraries they have.
As for humans, I just don't see how they could compete. Wikipedia took decades to write, millions of volunteers and Grokipedia (despite being a bit of an unmaintained mess) caught up to its article count in a few months. On top of that comes that all those projects aim for a neutral POV, which is very non-human to begin with and only going to benefit AI.
LLMs are not more neutral than humans. Not only because their learning material is biased but also because they can develop unexpected biases due to the non-deterministic and emergent nature of generative AI.
The idea that an LLM would be more neutral and less partial than a human is a very dangerous and very wrong one. It misunderstands the very nature of generative AI.
And while some people are able to tolerate AI generated text, a lot of people would never read Grokipedia. I would not. Despite great progress, generative AI is not able to create images that don't look absolutely disgusting in the eyes of actual artists. And the same is true regarding text output for anyone who cares about writing.
Wikis by article count:
Wikipedia: 65 million (English: 7.2 million)
Baidu Baike: 30 million
Hudong Baike: 15 million
Namuwiki: 8.7 million
Fandom: 40 million
In fact, the Everquest 2 wiki dwarfs the Yongle encyclopedia at ~400k articles.
"AI’s absorption of Wikipedia means that more people than ever are reading its content. Yet it also means that fewer people are visiting the site itself. When a Wikipedia link is suggested by a search engine, nearly a tenth of users click through. When Wikipedia is cited by an LLM, the clickthrough rate is only 0.33% (and not all credit their sources)."
Individuals may keep blogging out of the force of habit or to cater to narrow / walled-garden audiences, but there aren't that many people you can attract to a planetary-scale project with the pitch of "let's edit a training dataset for OpenAI together". We're taking away the motivation of trying to make something useful and good.
Some folks are saying that AI will only accelerate the creation of future Wikipedias, and that's obviously missing the point. Yes, there might be Grokipedia-style entities, probably a number of them.
They do show signs of stopping.
I also feel like the web of today (and the people using it) have much less the mindset for these things to appear. People used to see the internet as a big place to share knowledge whereas now the proportion of people seeing it as a market where to do business is much, much more the majority.
It always existed but I feel like the proportions have changed a lot.
From your list, I think most were started 15-20+ years ago[1] so your argument isn't contradicting the original point.
* * *
[1] OSM, Fandom and TV Tropes were started 22 years ago. Wikipedia itself was started 25 years ago.
I don't know what the future will be, but the future people who live in it will know and they're going to do something. I can say that with confidence, even without knowing exactly what they're going to do.
edit: grammar - see reply for old/wrong version.
Unless you have a political view to push. Visit Grokipedia today!
"Would you like to know more?"
Sites like WikiHow have seen a significant decline in traffic, and even more so in organic search.
Let’s take 2 of your examples: OSM still has major gaps that seem to be getting worse actually (so much outdated or missing stuff and I’ve seen the community worry about interest) and fan wikis have almost all consolidated onto the ad riden, unreadable monstrosity that is fandom.
Minecraft, GTA, League of Legends, Valorant, Overwatch, Fortnite, Warframe and RuneScape (OSRS too) all moved off Fandom because they started forcing ads even harder. They're now hosted by a nonprofit that takes money from Riot to host their official wikis and uses it to pay for the rest.
I think this will be the case for other things too. OpenStreetMaps won't need as many contributors as more sensors come online, eg. sensors and footage from hobby drones and people's phones augment how much information a single person can enter about a city.
But then it'll just be your AI slop and no one will care. If they want one they'll slop one up themselves instead of using yours.
The people building these technologies do not have a good understanding of humanity (they have some oversimplified view focused on reducing friction), and even if they did their goal is not to help communities from but rather extract the most profit for themselves out of society. They won't maintain the friction that helps communities form and keeps them cohesive, just like they won't maintain the friction that keeps us healthy as individuals.
> There are all sorts of possible ways we can do some large scale crowdsourced effort and its probably going to be realtime news e.g video streaming live events on an open platform not owned by corporations. Where there is no misinformation. No one can lie to us, we can see it happening.
That's a fantasy. The technological trend is towards more corporate ownership and more misinformation (or if there's less, it will only be because the corporate overlord AIs will suppress misinformation that's against their interests, and promote other misinformation that suits them better).
I think you're generalizing a brief summer, when the web was new and the power-that-be had not yet muster their resources to control it, as the natural state, when it was really a happy but unsustainable state.