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Comment by TFNA | Hacker News Reader

Many longtime OSM mappers have sensed that there has been some decline in interest and a risk to the long-term future of the project as a truly amateur-enthusiast phenomenon. Causes include: younger generations raised on corporate platforms and their phone apps are less aware of non-corporate alternatives, and might even be suspicious of libre and altruistic movements (this is a concern in Free Software circles, too); as the map got filled in, there were fewer obvious blanks that struck a total newbie as a place he/she could contribute; corporations got onboard both as OSM users and stakeholders, and then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps, too, etc.

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> corporations got onboard both as OSM users and stakeholders, and then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps,

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.

I would argue that the MAG7 - about whom these complaints are about I assume, not some random little startup that uses OSM API - can no longer be seen as classical corporations. The power and moat they assumed can not be achieved by most other such entities.

I think the difficult thing to reconcile is that you naturally will expect some degree of compensation (power, recognition, money, or a combo) for putting a lot of work into something.

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).

Expecting compensation is fine. Demanding compensation is not, simply because it doesn't work: open source succeeds because those who contribute gets more collaboration and visibility than those who don't.

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).

> 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 never hear about them but there are also invitation only communities where contributing is required. The benefits are not shared outside.

There's also a teapot in space. Prove that there isn't.

Same with taxes. People with less money have the most opinions about how other people (with more money) should spend their money.

> 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.

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.

> ideas they get from social media and movies.

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.

> 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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0

We constructed alien superintelligences with no human emotion or morality, they took over much of the world, and people are surprised that they’re seen as villains.

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.

> "A generation or two has been raised by Hollywood and Disney on business always being evil"

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?

> They’ve been trained, usually by a social media niche, to believe that the only good fight is to actively harm corporations.

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.

If you think about government and corporations - they're responsible for so many bad things in the world! I guess that's true, but how much of it is them just doing all the stuff?

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.

The material goods around me are crap and only serve to bring me further from being in touch with what it means to be human

Stop buying Chinese made stuff.

>Stop buying Chinese made stuff.

Correction:

Stop buy stuff.

Everything is actively getting worse for more corporate espionage. I didn't actually say anything about government, mine seems to genuinely care for our welfare.

Corporate food products (at least from the US) seem to be designed to just get you to consume more of them.

There's a growing sentiment in the US that capitalism in general and consumerism in particular are inherently bad and cause only hardship and exploitation for the general public.

... whereas the truth is ...?

That "capitalism" and "consumerism" are abstract concepts that represent pre-existing patterns of human activity that arise from a priori motivations, and are not things that exist as entities unto themselves exerting an influence on anyone's behavior or situational outcomes.

Capitalism is not inherently bad as such.

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).

The market abhors competition. The free market, absent government regulation, will always trend towards anticompetitive consolidation because it's far more profitable.

Cory Doctorow wrote about this: "Capitalists Hate Capitalism"

> 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-...

Individual participants in the market may abhor competition, but the market itself is made of competition.

Government intervention is the principal mechanism by which powerful participants restrain other partipants' market activity, and insulate themselves from competition.

This (being made of competition) has never happened in practice. What happens in practice is that one or a small set of participants become big enough to shut others out through all sorts of tactics including locking suppliers and customers into exclusive contracts, buying out competitors, paying for ads and headlines about customers, etc., etc.

> This (being made of competition) has never happened in practice.

So there is no theory/practice distinction here, because there is no applicable theory -- it's all just a description of manifest reality. Markets just are ecosystems of people engaging in value-for-value exchange with each other, and competition just is an inherent characteristic of them that's observable in reality.

> What happens in practice is that one or a small set of participants become big enough to shut others out through all sorts of tactics including locking suppliers and customers into exclusive contracts, buying out competitors, paying for ads and headlines about customers, etc., etc.

Negotiating exclusive contracts is a way of securing long-term business from a customer, motivated by a desire to prevent the customer from defecting to a competitor -- naturally, customers don't sign such agreements unless there's something in it for them.

Buying out competitors is only possible if there are competitors to buy out, which means there aren't barriers to entry, and other firms can target your weaknesses, which you're seeking to compensate for by gaining the market position of a firm that's been successful at doing so. If you can't maintain that position, someone else will fill it -- if they couldn't then the competitor you're acquiring couldn't have done it in the first place.

Paying for ads is a method of trying to win customers' business in a competitive environment. If you didn't have competition, you wouldn't need to advertise.

Everything you're listing here are methods by which firms engage in competition with each other. Every single item on your list is a tactic used by firms because they are in a competitive environment.

I would suggest reading some history rather than economic fantasy.

It's not "a competitive environment" just because it's legal to found a company if anticompetitive tactics are allowed.

You can start a railroad, but if the big existing railroads that already have lines running to the cities and factories refuse to let you connect to their service, your company has no hope of surviving.

You can start a factory making paperclips, but if the incumbent has billions of dollars in reserves and can afford to sell at a loss or barely above cost you will never be able to grow and thrive.

You can make a lot more money talking to your competitors and agreeing to fix prices or to each operate in regions that happen to not overlap, eliminating competition.

You can tell customers that if they want to buy product X that they want, they have to buy a bundle that includes Y, meaning that any competitors to Y are bound to fail since customers are already buying that version anyway.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. "History of antitrust" will give you any number of real world examples.

>Capitalism is not inherently bad as such.

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)

China didn't adapt it o "sinomarxistic ideals", whatever that is. Deng Xiaoping understood the failure of marxism, in almost all ways, so started ripping the band-aid.

But he also wasn't interested in major political change.

So we've got something that I'm surprised Europeans don't recognize; state-backed champions and heavy government intervention in various markets, and almost total free markets in sectors that the government doesn't really care about. But at no point can any one company or industry even attempt to undermine the central authority, because Deng wanted to get China out of the economic gutter, not lose power.

> Nearly all the material goods around me and a ton of services were provided by corporations

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.

So the problem with corporations is that governments sometimes do bad things that benefit them?

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?

Yeah, that seems like a perfectly natural response to the corporate capitalist hellscape the rising generations find themselves in.

Shock horror, people tend to care most about things that they feel personally affect them.

Corporatism != capitalism

>Corporatism != capitalism

Samesame after a while if unchecked, just play cyberpunk 2077 ;)

This is another theme I notice in this same cohort: It is not permissible to even suggest that they’re doing anything wrong. Any time someone highlights behaviors or beliefs that have problems or are inconsistent, someone will pop up and blame that on the corporations, too.

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.

> This is another theme I notice in this same cohort

> 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?

Both can be true.

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.

What do you mean about US coverage of foreign elections? (Was "second view" a mistake for "first view" in that sentence?)

“Probably” is key and doing some heavy lifting: both views are true.

> rather than some broader social forces

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.

Lol, I don’t use (have never used) TikTok; I generally think I have arrived at my current belief mostly through reading books.

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.

People are still responsible for their own opinions. Hiding behind "social forces" doesn't absolve them from that responsibility.

Sure, individuals can have wrong beliefs. Of course. So what? Should we consider people who have beliefs that we believe the be wrong bad people and disassociate from them? Or should we try to understand their point of view and why they believe the things that they do so we can either reevaluate our own beliefs or change theirs?

The weird thing to me is anthropomorphizing corporations as a "thing" - it's just a bunch of people too!

Corporations are literally people, not just made up of people. So shouldn't be too weird.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

...In the context of corporate law.

Yes, the law even anthropomorphizes them.

You engage in confessions as accusations when ignoring the possibility, it could be you who is wrong.

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".

What do you mean capitalism? As in the system of private ownership, free exchange, and due process, spanning back to the dawn of agriculture?

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.

> As in the system of private ownership, free exchange, and due process, spanning back to the dawn of agriculture?

As far as I can tell none of these things existed before modern times. Mostly people were under authoritarian rule.

You point out aspects you like about capitalism, but those maybe aren't the problematic parts to begin with? You imply, there were no viable alternatives, but that's just ignorance on your part.

When you refer to "private ownership", you unreflectedly endorse things like individuals "owning" land.

The consequence of that negligence are things like environmental destruction, capturing of arable land by rent-seeking individuals and on and on. A substantial part of what currently goes wrong on the macro-scale.

"Free exchange" is a misnomer in the same vein. The "freedom" leaves people to willfully avoid asking whether they really should in the first place. More importantly, it favors people with money to impose their will upon those without.

"Due process" isn't tied to capitalism to begin with and all these things don't "span back to the dawn of agriculture".

You put up the straw man of the Soviet Union, prepping it up to the height of serving as the epitome of what humans could conceive of as alternatives (or modifications) of the existing system. That's a declaration of intellectual bankruptcy, not higher insight.

> The problem isn't "corporations", it's capitalism.

well, other systems were tried and were worse (feudalism, communism etc)

in practice capitalism with some regulations is better than known alternatives

> Contributing to open source software or commons like Wikipedia definitely is questionable

what is not questionable then?

> This is another theme I notice in this same cohort: It is not permissible to even suggest that they’re doing anything wrong.

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.

If you translate "corporations" into it's actual meaning, then substitute it into your sentence, it becomes apparent how silly that is.

"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.

Much of the open source movement has its roots in anti-corporate culture too. Given that open source is now largely funded by corporations is a win for the ideals of open source but also a corruption of the early ethos; It’s very easy to equate open source with corporatism.

You could argue that companies funding open source development has contributed to the complexification and Poetteringization of the Linux desktop.

systemd is a lot less complex than legacy init systems, in the Rich Hickey sense of systems that are linked together in irregular and noisy ways.

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.

> 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.

this is also a very common take on HN

I think that's a natural sort of cognitive tendency for young people. We grow out of it. And fighting the corporations is a logical step at this point. Nice thing about open source is it'll wait patiently and grow when it can.

Whether this behavior makes sense (putting aside the fact that these social media networks are usually run by the same corporations) depends just on facts.

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.

Ironically, the opennness of OSM would later be used by the corporations they are fighting against.

Many longtime OSM mappers like myself are acutely aware of various corporations making big bucks on the back of our volunteered time and effort. Often times without contributing anything. Recently made worse by horrible API abuses.

I get why people might not be motivated to join us in the tragedy of the commons.

How many of the OSM mappers work for government agencies? Curious as they should be a reliable data source.

Very few, and in not all countries is government data compatible with OSM's license, so even people employed in state GIS can't necessarily edit the map from the office.

Isn't there a solution to that like dual licensing or restricting free API access for corporations?

It is not that the they make money, but the problem is that corporations with huge budgets can overshadow the volunteer run packaging of the said projects and eventually become the canonical way of using them.

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.

Why doesn't OSM have a separate price for corporate users of their data? ie: a company with above a certain number of employees pays more

You mean relicensing the project? The data has always been free to anyone. I think you might confuse the map data which is OSM with the external providers whose business is to repackage it into various windows, APIs and other services.

The kids are alright (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Zeloof). They are putting up more of a fight than you can imagine. The root cause of centralization is the way we do hardware manufacturing (as explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49690354). I think it will take about 5 years to make fabs into home appliances, then the entire stack will decentralize from the bottom up. The future is most likely solar/cypherpunk, at least in America.

I personally think most people become disengaged from the side of things like OSM because they literally don't have visibility to the problem. It becomes even worse when there are literally trillions of dollars of market value derives from the good work of open source, but people only see the badge of product and not all of the layers of onion beneath it.

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.

Is "they don't use OSM-based apps because the they're just not as good" not a possible explanation?

Quite a few of us are more than happy to use software that is "just not as good" as the corporate equivalent.

> 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>

This is not a new problem. I worked in corporate IT in the early 2000’s. Both attitudes existed even then, though of course there was no App Store back then. Nevertheless there was a strong preference among younger employees for paid software—the kind you get in boxes. The older generation viewed most software as suspect, but were willing to accept “official” solutions from Microsoft and other name brand software vendors. It seems comical now, but at the time Red Hat was viewed almost universally among my coworkers as a terrible idea. And forget about custom software. Rolling one’s own software was widely seen as crazy talk.

Never underestimate the blame game. It's a lot easier to place the blame on MS than on your own organisation. All customers knows you can't do anything about how windows works and have accepted the dysfunction already.

It took me the best part of 20 years of working in the corporate world to realise that the decisions aren't about the best thing for the user, or the employee, or even the shareholder, it's about the best thing for the decision maker. Ideally one which allows them to have no accountability whatsoever.

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.

Someone who worked in corporate law once said "in the rare case you have to hire outside counsel you always hire the fanciest name brand firm. Not because the fancy firm does better work, but because of risk mitigation and CYA. If things go sideways then you can say 'not my fault,I hired the fanciest firm.'"

Already in the 90‘s I has advocating for FOSS in a big company. And someone told me “nobody was ever fired for buying IBM” that phrase was already very old…

I remember buying SuSe Linux as literally boxed software around that time. But I bought it for my own use and my employer (not software industry) was running mostly windows with some legacy Unix.

IT told me recently that I couldn’t install a piece of software because since it was open source it wasn’t secure.

These same folks will very soon be replacing software that’s worked for years with something they vibe coded last week.

To be fair it's true. And likewise closed source is also not secure.

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.

in most corporate environments if your homebrew solution breaks, then you have a problem. If something that came from a vendor breaks, that’s not your problem.

I understand your frustration but I’ve given up fighting with IT and just let them sort it out

More likely, if your homebrew solution breaks then I have a problem and you've left.

In their defense, if something isn’t in my distro repo, 75% of the time I’ll ignore it. Using the operating system’s built in method of installing software is very preferable. It is mostly just Windows (and to a lesser extent MacOS) where some repo (because what is an App Store if not a paid repo) isn’t the default.

Of course, all the software in the distro repo is there because somebody went against this tendency.

Well, my son is an avid user of CoMaps. Better than Google Maps around here.

As long as there are walkers and cyclists to fix this one path in the woods, everything will be fine;

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.

Funny you mention that. I spend half of every year cycling the world, editing OSM while I do so. I am well aware that I am about the only person doing so for a given region of countryside, and it could be years before another mapper comes along after me. I can look back at places I mapped years ago, even before Covid, and see almost no additions since mine, even though the given routes might be popular ones that draw a lot of cyclists or overlanders.

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.

speaking of OSM... I've been part of teams at _certain country_'s _certain municipalities_ and teams working on GIS projects. so little among those people, who consume OSM content on a daily basis, even think about giving back, that even though I am not an OSM contributor, I start to get outraged at their total ignorance and disregard for crowd-sourced content, and the fact that someone put some work to have it there. same people are then getting royalties delivering this content to third parties. this is so wrong on so many levels, and I can't think of a way to make it work in a future where data is more precious than software packages.

OSM is still too difficult to contribute to for mass engagement. I spent an entire day trying to figure out how I could contribute fixes to the map for my corner of the country. There are 30 roads nearby with inaccuracies that would take me weeks to correct by hand. 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. Such a system might exist, but I wasn't able to figure out where it was or how to use it. If they want more users to contribute the system needs to be easier. Same for Wikis.

https://streetcomplete.app/ I think is a pretty good example of OSM making it easy to contribute. Maybe try it as an on-ramp? It doesn't record driving or anything, just gives you little quests for your area

The full list is at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Editors

Unironically, try asking Claude to make it for you.

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.

Do you have suitable aerial imagery available? Because if it that's the case (and this is the case in most countries) aligning 30 or so roads is an evening of mapping once you've bitten the bullet and learned to use JOSM (which is really not hard for most people with some technical background).

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.

That's why I mentioned it would propose edits for me to confirm. Most of the errors are not tracks, it's signs, directions, etc, which impacts nav.

Record your driving using any app that can export a GPX file (e.g. Strava, RideWithGPS, or Komoot). Import that GPX file into the standard OSM web editor and trace the displayed tracks.

It's not the track that's the issue, it's the street directions, intersections, signs, speed limits, etc

You are correct about phone apps, but many of us still use desktop computer systems. I do, for instance. Most gamers also do.

It is, however had, true, that the interaction pattern changed. So many walled ghettos about nowadays - look at Facebook and Google (via youtube).

New opportunities and directions open up all the time! AI is opening a whole new salient to attack the gatekeepers.

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.

https://github.com/storytold

https://discord.gg/artcraft

This reads as so pollyannish as to be nonsense.

I'm not a fan of pollyannish declarations, but I try not to dismiss ideas on delusionally enthusiastic tone alone.

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.

AI is the attack. You can't possibly be this clueless, so I only have to assume trolling.

Very cool, chatgpt. Get a real website and MAYBE I'll take you seriously.

> "AI is opening a whole new salient to attack the gatekeepers. Everything will be rewritten as high quality open source software."

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?

I was done with OSM within a few days. I fixed some streams to be in the right place, reverted.

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

To get instant pushback from other mappers is fairly unusual; I would say you had bad luck (or live in Lithuania). In a lot of the world, edits correct or incorrect can take months or years to be noticed by another mapper.

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.

Is Lithuania known for particularly engaged OSM mappers? (wondering what reference I'm not catching)

For long years it was dominated by one mapper who considered the country his personal project and insisted on an idiosyncratic tagging scheme. He became infamous for instantly reverting edits even by savvy mappers. Intervention by OSM's conflict-resolution body has reduced that somewhat, but that country remains a special case.

The utterly insane way the Danish community forbids linking addresses to POIs (shops, restaurants, you name it) comes to mind. They've built a system where they import all addresses, but they never managed to make it work in combination with user contributed data, so every address gets deleted unless imported by their official import tool. So a restaurant can never get associated with its address in Denmark on OpenStreetMap.

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.

The times I have done something in Germany the pushback has been swift and not very friendly so I stopped. I guess it's a localised problem, haven't had any problems in Sweden so far.

I haven't had any problems in Germany.

I had the opposite expeirence just a few years back adding a air gun club. I used some layer and someone else fixed it up for me.

> then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps, too

”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.

TBF corps can use and profit from GPL and AGPL stuff just fine, even if they comply with the license (though they usually just don't bother)

GPL should absolutely be the default choice for software. It is quite weird when people choose the MIT license and then complain when others use their open source software and turn it into a proprietary for profit software when the author explicitly allowed them to do this in the license. The MIT is really not long. People should read it before using it.

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.

Why should the GPL be the default?

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.

The GPL has nothing to do with usage and what others are doing with it. On the contrary: it explicitly provides the freedom to use the software as you wish, including for commercial use. Even Stallman is against licences that would prohibit commercial use.

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.

Because I want to open source my software AND don't want it used commercially. What's the problem? I just use the AGPL and that's that.

AGPL doesn't prohibit commercial usage. The vendor just need to provide the sources for the service.

The AGPL does not prevent commercial neither as a user nor as a publisher of the software. It even prevents anyone from creating a derivative work from your software and publishing it under a license that prohibits commercial use.

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.

Yeah that's what I want, corporations to be unable to close my software behind a network and improve it without releasing the improvements.

Default for people who want their open source work to stay open source and not privatized by billionaire companies.

SaaS is how billionaire companies privatize and profit from GPL software.

(Alternately, Google for people trying to get the full sourcecode to their Android phones from Samsung and see how difficult it can be).

I agree but the reality is most authors want to use their OSS creations at work, which usually means they will make a compromise with capitalists who reject copyleft licenses.

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.

The people choosing the MIT/BSD license and the people complaining about for-profit use are not the people.

Yeah and the soup kitchen has no right to complain that I packaged up all their food and sold it next door. Clearly they should have made everyone sign a contract before getting any food if they didn't want that.

Soup kitchens don't generally give away bulk quantities of food to just anyone.

Well run soup kitchens ban buying in bulk

You're more or less right. OSM (via an exhaustive licence change process) did indeed choose the licence that matched its preferences, and almost all contributors are happy that it allows commercial use.

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".

Tolerating the intolerant will erode the very basis that enables you to be tolerant.

It’s the same thing with freedoms

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