The bad faith argument is not amusing nor welcome.
Ahem. Moderator here. Several of you have flagged various posts in this thread as inappropriate, off-topic, needing to be moved to another thread. In reviewing this entire thread I see a conversation that has wandered all over the map (pun intended). That said I see no offensive posts that deserve to be hidden or deleted…just a lack of focus. So please just come back to the subject at hand (what was it again? Oh, yeah, “Who Really Owns OpenStreetMap? A Personal Concern About Big Tech…”) and if you want to change the subject, please start another thread.
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what about this? In roman law, I remember reading that ownership is usus + fructus + abusus. I’d say that OSM is organized so that nobody has abusus, and everybody has fructus. Can we still talk about ownership then?
This might explain why the discussion seemed unfocused: it was seeking its own space. Governance, cost sharing (nearly up to the point that someone talk about consent to taxes), what else am I missing? Just not ownership.
Wat? In what way is @apm-wa’s comment ‘abusive’ against you?
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This you ?
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One of the big draws of OSM for me is that through its free licensing it is separate from the system of corporations. I can get data and I can update it and no large corporation is in position to tell me not to (at least not directly). I can view a map. I can do routing. I can download data. Yes some of these services based on OSM data, are paid, as they should be when they cost money to provide, but they’re mostly not made by a multinational that holds itself to no laws, no standards, and no goals other than shareholder value.
I don’t get excited or happy that data I contribute can be used by corporations. I don’t mind it either. If they don’t find the data useful, they won’t use it. If they do find it useful, they’d steal it if they had to. Like corporations breaking GPL or like Overture. That’s just what they do. I don’t contribute data or experience that I would be upset to find stolen.
I wouldn’t expect a corporation to pay me $1000/month unless they had signed a contract that said they had to pay $2000/month. As it stands the contract is ODbL, which says they must credit OSM Contributors, and they don’t do that properly. I am disappointed that OSMF hasn’t enforced that, but again, not really surprised.
Regarding corporate influence in OSM, I think the most clever thing they’ve done is convince OSM contributors that OSM is a “do-ocracy”. In practice what this looks like is that we debate whether fixing typos is a good idea and what map matching algorithm could be used to solve problem XYZ, while corporations create a MapRoulette Challenge (a tool made by someone employed at a corporation), and a bunch of accounts named like VDL123 complete the tasks they assign to get the changes they want. It is a do-ocracy now, and those who pay get what they want done. So far they haven’t done anything too egregorious, probably because they haven’t found anything worth their while, but if they do, I expect our response to be as weak as for license violations.
To answer the questions, IMO:
Who benefits most from our volunteer contributions?
I benefit from them. Corporations probably benefit more, but I can’t control that.
Are we, the grassroots mappers, indirectly helping the very systems we’re resisting?
Not more than in other ways we participate in The System.
What happens when those with power, servers, AI, staff, start shaping OSM’s priorities?
You get iD and NSI.
How do we protect the values of community-driven mapping in an open system?
Keep on detaching from corporations. Don’t rely on their donations, monetary or in-kind. Ignore their products. Make stuff for ourselves.
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Allan is doing a tremendous job. I have no clue what you’re talking about.
That doesn’t give you any status. We don’t do hierarchy over here. Sit down.
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People tend to join OSM to map the world, not to get themselves caught up in legal battles with big data.
That aside, people like Mateusz have been hard at work to improve our visibility by asking third party users to credit us for our work. Anyone can be part of the solution when they volunteer their time and effort.
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No. It’s not “fairly good”. It’s not acceptable. They should not get a free pass. They have the technical means to give proper attribution without user interaction, as per my* requirements. And they have deliberately chosen not to.
(Disclaimer: I don’t own any device where I can check if this has been fixed as of today, but that’s beside the point).
Also have a look at the recent topic about Overture’s miscommunication (unintentional or otherwise) about copyright and attribution requirements — On Overture's Avoidance of the ODbL.
I would be happy with “fairly good” for a mom and pop’s homemade website, where the CSS is slightly botched and the attribution is halfway hidden behind a scrollbar.
(* and yours, and every mapper’s, as written in our guidelines)
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The fact that the legal systems put an individual volunteer at a stark disadvantage against a larger legal entity does not equate “I don’t care about copyright attribution,” at least for me.
I map because my data is going to remain free and properly attributed, and because mapping is fun. Both are important to me. I think there are many others who feel this way.
Two community members flagged your post as inappropriate. I have accepted their flags and sent it back to you for editing. If you disagree with this action you have the right to appeal it to the OpenStreetMap Foundation board of directors.
In that case I thank you for your efforts in helping out with the copyright attribution of our geodata.
OSM is here and isn’t going anywhere. I believe that’s what’s the most important. And I still hope that one day there will be an app made on OSM data made by those big corpos, with an OSM attribution, that can finally rival Google Maps. Such an invention won’t hurt but will only help OSM, unless the wave of new users would be too hard for verification of edits but that’s a problem for another time that do I think can be dealt with. A big part of why I want a competitor for Google Maps, is because it’s already stealing data from us (yes, it’s 100% confirmed, we found so much evidence) without giving ANY attribution while it prohibits using its data for OSM mapping.
Sorry but that is nonsense, there has never been a verified case in which Google has knowingly used data from OSM in a way that violates our licence (there is a case in which a Google data supplier used OSM many years back, but that was promptly resolved).
There isn’t even a reasonable economic incentive for Google to do so.