OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap and Linux are pretty similar in a lot of ways. The licences are both copyleft, require attribution, and allow modification and re distribution. Both projects have a foundation to look over them, but are relatively hands of on day to day operations. Both foundations have corporate sponsorship to fund them.
However when it comes to edits, the projects differ. Linux is now hugely dominated by paid developers, OSM is almost exclusively volunteers. One reason for this may be because most downstream users of OSM use it exclusively as a base map, they use there POI data on top and then almost laughably link to Google Maps for directions. They are only using a tiny portion of OSM. (And they are missing out!)
Lots of Linux contributors are paid employees of a business, usually tasked with fixing or implements a specific thing. As far as I know only Amazon does this in OSM, paying employees to fix routing issues. Sometimes this is closer to having a benefactor, where the business pays the employee to work on what ever they want and the benefactor trusts it’s in the best interest over all. Mark Shuttleworth ran Ubuntu as a loss for a long time, they contributed to the whole ecosystem during that time. I guess Mapbox might have the finances to be able to be a benefactor, but other than them there doesn’t seem to be a lot of money around.
Some developers are founded directly through other people on platforms like Patreon. I don’t think this is a massive in the kernel space, although a few high profile developers for other projects do it. You would then get the freedom to spend your time how you wanted, working on projects that interest you. This is similar to having a benefactor although you have to spend a significant amount of time and effort marketing yourself, and being your own PR. I don’t know if OSM has a big enough crowd to support this.
Some developers work as contractors just implementing or fixing things for one off payments, bug bounties are a form of this. This is less popular in the kernel than other projects, possibly because of the amount of paid employees contributing, but it still exists. This maybe the a viable option for paid edits in OSM, if a company wants to ensure that all there stores are listed and of high quality in OSM they could hire someone from the community to do so. Somebody who already knows the tools, somebody who knows the community, somebody who knows the how to integrate there data into OSM.
It’s no secret that I want to turn OSM editing into my job, employee, contractor or my own business. I just don’t know where to start.
Discussion
Comment from Sanderd17 on 11 June 2020 at 07:28
More and more OSM mappers are paid mappers too.
There is a wiki page about organised mappers (though not all of those are actually paid).
And Pascal Neis reports these in OSM Stats, the number of organised mappers is consistently above 50%.
You have to realise the Linux kernel is way older than OSM. So the kernel has worked its way into many and big companies, The same will happen with OSM over time. The more companies that rely on it, the more paid mappers will arive.
Comment from CjMalone on 11 June 2020 at 13:28
I think that’s the big one, companies will invest into parts that they use. Amazon into routing, Facebook into roads. When more companies use OSM data they will invest money and peoples into the data and tooling around OSM.
Comment from imagico on 11 June 2020 at 16:12
Like so many others who compare OSM to their favorite garden variety tech project you seem to not consider that those are all highly culturally non-diverse projects. What OSM tries to do is something very different. Running OSM like a garden variety tech project would be comparatively easy and this would avoid the need to deal with a lot of problems OSM is struggling with. But it would also mean giving up on the core of what OSM tries to achieve - creating a map of the world by the people for the people based on these people sharing their local knowledge in egalitarian, self determined cooperation.
Comment from CjMalone on 11 June 2020 at 18:14
OSM is already so much more than just local people mapping local things. I have a lot of respect for the people at the beginning mapping roads with only GPS traces, but OSM wouldn’t be at this level today without using data and satellite images from companies. I don’t have GPS (due to my phone being broken) so I literally couldn’t contribute to OSM without the data already available to us, if the people before me never mapped the roads and the buildings I wouldn’t be able to add shops and POIs.
Companies are already a part of OSMs past and present, I don’t think that’s something to shy away from. Maybe I’m being naively optimistic, but I think they can play a good part in the future of OSM.
I’ve been saying companies, but by that I just mean an organisation of some kind. Charities, foundations, common interest companies and for profit companies were what I was thinking about.
Comment from Sanderd17 on 11 June 2020 at 18:26
You could also say we have access to that data thanks to early mappers using GPS to map streets. I still remember how I tested out my GPS antenna, and tried to map roads as good as I could without imagery. I also remember the first imagery we got from Yahoo, which was pixelated to a point where you could barely see buildings, and in places very cloudy.
But thanks to the efforts of the early mappers, companies also started to see the advantages of crowdsourced data, and eventually released aerial images.
Comment from CjMalone on 11 June 2020 at 19:14
And look how powerful that’s been, what started as a few people doing GPS traces while riding on bikes and driving cars created this whole Open Data ecosystem. OSM being an example of Open Data encouraged more data to be released by companies which further improved OSM. The perfect cycle.
Ordnance Survey is now a foot note in the mapping world. You all did that. Like I said before, massive respect to everyone involved.
Comment from ABZ_OSM on 30 June 2020 at 21:06
There’s countless other reasons to improve OSM. eg ability to see layered data, through histosm.org, overpass-turbo.eu etc.
When folks are in the car looking for my house they get out google maps on the phone, because they don’t yet know about OSM, which is rapidly improving. It seems to me that the number of editors will skyrocket over the next few years, mostly community based and unpaid.
If anyone is looking for paid help with mapping I’m happy to help.
Anyways, today I finally got round to having a struggle with google about the location of my house in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, being in the wrong location. I had tried to feed back the correct location to them countless times through their google maps interface, and had never succeeded. So today I took the plunge and found a way to chat with someone at google via a chat link, and the experience was excruciating. Very helpful guy, but his google interface wouldn’t even let him receive an OSM link to show the exact, correct, location. His employer had blocked anything but google site links on their system. Embarrassing. I really felt for him. He also took ages to understand what I meant by the wrong location, though he was a really nice guy. I found the whole experience painful and eventually we resorted to email to slow things down so he could have a chance to work through it. May be he was a generalist and not a maps expert, who knows. As I said very helpful tho.
Where as in OSM all you do is fire up josm …
.
Comment from ABZ_OSM on 30 June 2020 at 21:16
For me the main driver is that google could at any moment switch off google maps or make it a pay for service, say at £1/person/mth. I firmly believe ,maps should be a community resource owned by all that no one potentially has the power to switch off.
Comment from CjMalone on 30 June 2020 at 22:10
I don’t think that Google would switch Maps off, or charge end users, but it’s very possible they do another massive price increase for business and academic use. Without OSM small companies would have no chance of being able to make a Pokemon Go type game, they couldn’t afford the Google Maps fees. OSM enables that type of creativity without needing a bunch of start up money.
I think, for me it’s about the ownership of the data. It’s our world, it’s our map of the world. Not a private companies.
And I absolutely love that OSM enables alternative map apps like OSMAnd and Maps.Me, the competition drives the quality of all the map apps, and improves the end users experience.