Who Really Owns OpenStreetMap? A Personal Concern About Big Tech in OSM

[SomeoneElse (Andy Townsend)]

Most online maps have “improve this map”, “send product feedback” or similar. That is often used by people wanting to get false data into online maps. With OSM-based maps we’ve seen users banned from OSM for vandalism using that mechanism with third parties to try and get their desired content into OSM, and I’m sure Google get the same. Often those third parties assume good faith (since obviously the reporter does not say “this is false, I’ve been banned from OSM and so am asking you to add it”) and sometimes those edits make it into OSM**. I’ve no idea what level of QA there is behind Google’s “Send product feedback”, but sometimes the accompanying evidence can be quite elaborate (fake photos, fake online listings/reviews) so it wouldn’t surprise me if they were taken in some of the time.

** although not always; in the most recent example I saw the review chain at the third party smelt a rat and contacted OSM directly to check.

[ארץ_ישראל_הטובה_מאוד_מאוד_2026]

The discussion is too long, you should read it from the beginning, and maybe you can summarize the discussion.

[SomeoneElse (Andy Townsend)]

@ארץ_ישראל_הטובה_מאוד_מאוד_2026

you should read it from the beginning, and maybe you can summarize the discussion

I’m not sure who “you” is in there (Discourse hides whether replies were to the last poster or just general), but in case it’s me I was just trying to provide some anecdata to add to @alan_gr’s summary above.

Obviously this thread has meandered away from the original question a bit, but personally I don’t have a problem with that, the comments are all still useful.

[ארץ_ישראל_הטובה_מאוד_מאוד_2026]

I agree with that

[ארץ_ישראל_הטובה_מאוד_מאוד_2026]

With that, maybe we can go back and deal with the initial issue [To sum up the discussion, I think I don’t care about the interests of Google and the companies as long as it helps women. I don’t care who uses the data. Maybe they should give credit, but they don’t have to either. Of course, all of this is on the condition that their services are free]

[Xvtn]

You can use the “top replies” button on the forum to see an OK summary of the discussion so far.

[Jonathan_Hartley]

I see a parallel with the course open software has taken, where open source started as grass-roots driven, contributed to by enthusiastic practitioners, all just like OSM. But then as the decades passed, and open source software grew to be of massive, industry revolutionizing import and value, the big corporate players sucked it up and usually, with some exceptions, contribute back very little.

This can lead to some suboptimal outcomes, such as people contributing to open source for for large parts of their careers, for the joy of it, but then finding that Amazon has incorporated the project into a paid offering on AWS, from which they are reaping literally billions, while the contributors to the project are realizing they have given and given and given, for decades, and are now left out in the cold in terms of any sharing of that wealth, and they are now burned out after a career spent contributing, and still contorting their lives to make it possible to continue contributing the ongoing maintenance the project needs.

Which is what they signed up for originally, I can see that. But to see this exploitation happen again and again, with different people on different projects. it does stick in one’s craw somewhat. I only wonder what the equivalent would look like as OSM continues to grow in influence and hence financial value.

[ארץ_ישראל_הטובה_מאוד_מאוד_2026]

The question is whether Google, for example, asks for payment to be seen on its maps or not, because I always say that as long as they provide the service for free and no matter how much money they make from it, then I don’t care.

[ארץ_ישראל_הטובה_מאוד_מאוד_2026]

Although sometimes it causes problems

Golf Courses - how to remove from bike route

If only Google Maps shows the paths as bicycle paths, you should contact Google, not OSM. Both the Valhalla and OSRM routers do in fact use these paths as bicycle paths, but GraphHopper does not. So it seems some routers do not interpret cart_path properly, as iandees already mentioned.

Such as Google copying something from us Help and support - OpenStreetMap Community Forum
and causing problems

[ארץ_ישראל_הטובה_מאוד_מאוד_2026]

Usually the lazy ones use copy-paste, so you can use the technical department to prohibit pasting more than twenty words at a time [although personally it would bother me because I don’t speak English and I use Google Translate. No, I’m not lazy and I don’t care about transferring twenty words from the translation every time. The main thing is that the lazy ones don’t want to do it that way, and it will deter them]

[CjMalone]

A nice little copyright Easter egg

Another method is bad data/spelling mistakes in OSM, they have been used to identify and verify other people taking the data. OSMF do know about the method.

[SekeRob]

So: https://osmfoundation.org/

Not going to waste my time reading the bylaws and what not. I CHOOSE to contribute, the non-monetary benefit comes back in countless ways directly and indirectly, in one place literally called ‘the mental remuneration’ and if at some point OSM(F) is being monetized i.e. goes commercial, so be it. At this time though I think it’s same as overlarge banks… too big to let fail, drip feed with donations, some very substantial, and steering how that is used.

OK.

[SimonPoole]

You don’t need to read the bylaws, you just need to read the contributor terms, something that you hopefully did during sign up for your OSM account.

[ארץ_ישראל_הטובה_מאוד_מאוד_2026]

@ארץ_ישראל_הטובה_מאוד_מאוד_2026

Usually the lazy ones use copy-paste, so you can use the technical department to prohibit pasting more than twenty words at a time [although personally it would bother me because I don’t speak English and I use Google Translate. No, I’m not lazy and I don’t care about transferring twenty words from the translation every time. The main thing is that the lazy ones don’t want to do it that way, and it will deter them]

( : ( : ( : ( :

[SomeoneElse (Andy Townsend)]

@ארץ_ישראל_הטובה_מאוד_מאוד_2026

so you can use the technical department to prohibit pasting more than twenty words at a time

(apologies for offtopic diversion but)

Discourse does have mechanisms for warning moderators about this sort of thing. Most of the examples it finds are false positives (like you, someone using a translator) and those are released pretty quickly, but occasionally it finds a genuine problem.

[dieterdreist (Martin Koppenhöfer)]

You don’t need to read the bylaws, you just need to read the contributor terms, something that you hopefully did during sign up for your OSM account.

I don’t think people typically read these, on signup. Maybe later on. Nowadays we are used that such terms are something like 60 pages of legalese, so I expect many to not even click on the link to see the full text (and discover that the OpenStreetMap terms are only one page).

[SimonPoole]

Still they are what regulates the relationship between mappers and the OSMF, the OSMF AoA are simply not relevant in the context, and if you so want, the CTs are a poison pill for any attempted takeover of the OSMF for monetary reasons.

[Matija_Nalis]

@Brazil_Singh

They’re doing it because it saves them money, gives them control, and helps their bottom line.

Sure, that is their motive. I do however wonder why you seem to consider that “someone doing a good contributions because it helps their bottom line” is a problem, though?

There is almost always^[1] some motive that makes people do things: sometimes it is money, sometimes it is vanity (or lesser forms of ego boost), sometimes it is (e.g. government) policy, sometimes it is scratching your own itch, sometimes it is something else.

What should count however is not “what was the motive” for their adding data to OSM, but the quality of the contributed data.

I’m not a big a big believer of “black or white” view on the world. I don’t believe that there exist a single organization (a or a human) on a planet that is entirely “good” or entirely “bad” (and have enough introspection to know that this definition includes even myself, cognitive dissonance be damned).

In other words, generalization is bad. It is equally bad when one generalizes a group of people by e.g. their nationality or by their political or religious affiliations, as it is when one generalizes whole set of completely different actions just because they belong to the same actor.

Yes, I do hate Facebook for their “privacy raping for profit” practices (and I might be among first on the barricades to demand that they stop doing it).
But does that mean I refuse to use zstd which is absolutely great (and not privacy violating) compressor and has been released as FOSS to the public, just because it was written by them? No, I’ll happily use it, and even advocate for it. And ask for them to do more community-positive things like that, not less.

The point being: every actor in the world is not only not “black or white”, it is not even shades of gray: but full multicolor.
What we should do IMHO is praise beneficial actions, and condemn hurting actions; regardless of who was the actor in question.

Unconditionally condemning all actions just because they come from some actor is actively encouraging them to become even more evil (i.e. if one is going to be equally villainized regardless of they do, then we’ve taken out all PR incentives for them to make any good actions, and incentivized them to just always go with worst possible actions which are most money making).

@Brazil_Singh

I get it, OSM is open. Anyone can use it. That’s the point. But

I’m not a big fan of “yes, but…” arguments, as they inevitably boil down to “no”. As for why it is open for all; it is time-proven pragmatic choice.

For example, can FOSS (and OSM data for that matter) be used to build self-navigating innocent civilian killing bombs? Yes. Do we want to support innocent civilians being killed? Certainly not!

But if you try to codify safeguards against that unwanted behaviors (e.g. “no one affiliated with any military might use this software”), you go down the neverending rabbit hole and result is always much worse then if you just let it be fully open source. (e.g. governments are by definition affiliated with their military, so it means no government access to OSM either; for just the simplest example of which there are millions)

And, it wouldn’t work anyway. As we see, in capitalism profit trumps all (including law). If e.g. Facebook can (noticeably) increase their profits by contributing to OSM, they would do so, regardless of whether was legal or not (as we can see it other cases before courts). If it was forbidden to them, they’d just make sure to hide it well enough so they’re not caught (as being caught would affect the profits).

So by attempting to restrict such contributions, not only would we significantly damage unrelated contributions, and make OSM much less likely to used (due to legal uncertainties introduced), but we would also make actual contributions by them worse (not only because we wouldn’t be able to tell which those edits are, but they’d also lose any incentive to follow any other OSM guidelines and thus might erode data quality of parts which is not important to their bottom line)

@Brazil_Singh

openness without ethical safeguards can become a backdoor for exploitation.

As the popular truism goes: “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”

Uncomfortable^[2], but still true. So, go in peace and remain vigilant.

Just as Ad hominem is logical fallacy (i.e. someone being wrong previously in argument A, or having certain motivation, does not mean that their argument B is logically false), so it similarly applies here - regardless if someone’s motivation is money, or that their previous contribution was lacking, does not mean that they new contribution is not good (or even great).
Yeah, it might warrant some more scrutiny (just like contributions from newbie might warrant), but that is about it.

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TL;DR: good OSM data is good OSM data, regardless of other moral failures that its contributor might have. But we must always remain vigilant so that no one will try to abuse their access.

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1. well, there is some random chance of unintentional contributions, but I’d say it is statistically insignificant ↩︎

2. I mean, we all do prefer by nature to be lazy! Biological forms wanting to conserving energy as much as possible is the second law of thermodynamics personified ↩︎

[Matija_Nalis]

@Baloo_Uriza

really should be paying the OSMF and our volunteers for our contributions

Errr, if you give money to people for the work that they do, then it is no longer really volunteering, is it?

And, more problematically, it would invite the same feedback loop that you seem to be against: as most people are reluctant to “bite the hand that feeds them”, those (so-called) “payed volunteers” thus by natural selection will be changing their mapping and trying to concentrate on mapping things that benefits those mega corporations, lest the said corporations choose to give money to some other mappers which benefit corporation bottom line more. (as it is obviously impossible for even mega corporations to pay full living wage to every existing OSM mapper ever, they will prioritize - and will obviously prioritize in a way that most benefits them)

@Baloo_Uriza

I mean paying existing unpaid volunteers a living wage in their current country.

I’m not a big fan of the idea. Giving money to produce some measurable metrics is likely to lead to bad quality data or even fake data (as it gives preference to quantity over quality). And the poorer the country, the bigger the risk.
It is no coincidence that popular scam type is called e.g. “Nigerian scam” and not say “Denmark scam”. The lower your living standard is, the more likely you are to make moral compromises to get some money. It’s just Darwinism at work. It’s much easier to be altruistic when you don’t have to worry if you’ll be able to feed your children tomorrow too.

@Baloo_Uriza

Corporations need to pay into the society that allows them to exist.

You are aware that most of those corporations are publicly traded, right? And that they are legally obliged to do things that their shareholders prefer, and that they are legally not allowed to do things contrary to their shareholder wishes?

So there is one^[1] solution, and that one works already: you buy their stocks, convince other like-minded people to buy their stock, and convince other stockholders that it is in their best interest to vote for certain percentage of profits to be directed towards OSMF or certain mappers. And then the issue to shareholders vote.

The challenge is of course in convincing other people why is that a good idea that they should support, and that one requires a good deal of political skills (just ranting about it is unlikely to be helpful: in fact, it very likely to have the opposite effect and have stockholders automatically avoiding more persuasive arguments in the future)

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But there is a much easier way to be a change you want to see in the world: Find people contributing to OSM that you think are already doing a good work, especially if they’re asking for funds, like e.g. (not affiliated and have not looked hard enough to vouch for them, but I recall them lately asking for help) contrapunctus, and donate to them (instead of giving money to those big megacoorporations).

E.g. skip buying new iPhone (or whatever product of those big corporations), continue using your old phone, and distribute that money that you saved to mappers that you think deserve it. Result is basically the same as if you’ve given the money to Apple, and then the Apple have donated that money to them (main difference being you that in this particular case you also reduce amount of electronic trash, and that you get to choose who is worthy of donation, instead of it being guided by corporate interests)

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1. law abiding solution that is; there is always the alternative to rob them and redistribute the money “Robin Hood”-style ↩︎

[Jofban]

@Matija_Nalis

So there is one solution, and that one works already: you buy their stocks

You can also choose to not buy their products (or choose alternatives). It’s unlikely that any significant amount of stock can be purchased via individual action, especially as rising stock is usually seen as “continue what you are doing”. Falling sales doesn’t have that effect…
And you can use the saved money to donate yourself

@Matija_Nalis

E.g. skip buying new iPhone (or whatever product of those big corporations), continue using your old phone, and distribute that money that you saved to mappers that you think deserve it.