Right. Now go back to 1994 and s/Google Maps/CDDB/g [1]
The lesson was clear: you contribute to proprietary databases at your great peril. People access Google Maps at the whim of Google. They could decide tomorrow to deny access, and you'd have no say in the matter.
I enjoy HN and have lots of respect for this community, but there's a strong contradiction in the way we discuss I.P.
On one hand, we're a community of people who found and contribute to software businesses. Most of these companies depend on selling intellectual property in the form of code and data.
Yet, as makers or hackers, some of us despise the companies that attempt to profit from selling I.P. We expect that all components of software be free for us to tinker with and repurpose.
"Well...wait a minute," one might say, "There doesn't have to be a dichotomy between totally closed and totally open."
Exactly! That's precisely what Google is trying to achieve with its mapping initiative. The firm is investing heavily in community tools (not to mention SDKs for developers) that give us an opportunity to participate: posting, querying and modifying data.
Being both entrepreneurs and makers, we should be a little more realistic about our relationship with IP. You can't always have your cake and eat it, too.
> We expect that all components of software be free for us to tinker with and repurpose.
OSM, along with its cousins-in-spirit projects Wikipedia and Libre Software are not about hacking on software. They are about building a society.
A society where no one has to depend on someone else. A society where everyone can learn and share with its co-citizens.
The number one foundation for building this society is that data be:
* accessible without needing explicit authorization,
* modifiable without needing explicit authorization,
* shareable with anyone without needing explicit authorization
in short, what the Free Software definition [0] does for software, but generalized to knowledge (for Wikipedia) or geographical position (for OSM).
By using and (worse !) contributing to Google Maps, you don't build this society. You trust Google to do it; but that's not the reason why Google exists, so you can't be sure about that. Plus, if you recall not-so-old history, you must remember how easy it is for Google to unplug applications even if they are used.
Google is giving you great, shiny toys to play with. But you can only build the present with them. I'd rather trust the future in a Foundation than in a company whose goal is to make money.
If you had to wrap projects together like Wikipedia, OSM, etc (open data sets that you could argue are the foundation of society), what would you call the collection?
Yes, of course, that goal is utopian (well, I hope we don't follow the definition too closely and actually reach the dream). But the good thing is that they don't depend on time, money or anything else. It's a belief, and the people's mind will change over time.
You could draw a parallel with ecology. 50 years ago, no one would care about the environment; resources were basically free, pollution was seen as "minor". A world were everyone cared about the planet was seen as utopian. After half a decade of fights, the minds have now switched to a different mind (at least in the western world): pretty much every single piece of electronic hardware you can buy has some notion of "we-are-green" to it. While it's not 100% eco-friendly (just take a look at how electronics are "recycled"), people's mind certainly have changed. The guys behind the Libre software movement certainly don't expect anything big happening in the next 10 years (remember that RMS has been fighting for the last 30 years), but things will change, you can be sure of it. Just take a look at the recent plans to to "take control back" on the internet infrastructures initiated by Europe and Brazil. Sure, technically the things will more or less remain the same; but the mindset is changing, and it will keep spreading.
> How about a less grandiose goal like "making software better and more accessible"
This is a really noble goal in itself, and Google can be praised as one of the biggest enablers in this field, seeing how much they have changed the domain. While I may not sound like it, I actually thank them for all they did to the tech world, and the end-users in general (with an extraordinary amount of stuff available as OSS). Actually, that goal is more or less what OSS tries to achieve, except that the target is not the end user but the developer: the goal is to make sure that developers don't reinvent the wheel again and again and again.
But that goal is orthogonal to what the Libre movement (FSF, OSM, Wikipedia) fights for. That goal can very well be accomplished with private companies: in the majority of cases, they help society by building better and more accessible "things", because that's a sure way to make money (with the notable exception of US telcos), and money is what they're here for. But that doesn't mean you are independent; it's quite the contrary in fact, because their tool is so easy and powerful to use that you just use them. This is what many people call a walled garden: you can live in a complete ecosystem, where everything works perfectly together... but once you start wandering around, you quickly realize that there are boundaries to what you can do [0]. The tech world is even worse than this description, because everything can change in 10 years; you can't expect all your belongings to remain accessible at the end of your lifetime.
The FSF doesn't want to build better software. There even was a post recently mocking their logos. They want to build software so that you don't need to depend on anyone else. If you don't depend on anyone else, you can do whatever you want.
>some of us despise the companies that attempt to profit from selling I.P.
If I despised Google, or any company that profits from selling IP, I would have said so.
If you can either contribute to an open dataset or a closed one, you contribute to the open one because the benefit no longer relies on the goodwill of any dataset owner. This principle underlies not only Open Street Maps, but OSS in general, and with a little finagling, things like Bitcoin. If the last few years have taught us anything, it's that we cannot rely on the basic decency of any institution.
I'm not happy about it. I wish I could trust institutions to be decent. But time and again they act indecently, and weather the (short) media storm, and keep going, business as usual, and we must protect ourselves from that. To do otherwise is to ignore the lessons of the past.
There isn't really anything contradictory about being cautious of doing free work for a huge for profit corporation. If Google shared the data you would be getting different responses, but they only use the data to improve their products.
(I can totally see submitting a change to get rid of an annoyance; I don't get warm fuzzies from 'helping Google make maps a better product'.)
Yet, as makers or hackers, some of us despise the companies that attempt to profit from selling I.P. We expect that all components of software be free for us to tinker with and repurpose.
Why should we trust Google with this data? Why should we supply google with this data when open alternatives exist? Will their incentives in using this data always be aligned with ours? You don't have to despise Google or want all things to be totally open to ask these questions. You don't have to be hostile to IP or companies selling IP to decide it is more in your interest to contribute to an open project.
I'd rather contribute data to an open project and watch a thousand mapping projects bloom (including Google's) based on that data, than help a corporation like Google or Apple take over every corner of our digital lives. OSM has led to a lot of great mapping services based on their data, and no-one resents those.
It'd be wonderful to see a similar open web search project based on open data too.
Being both entrepreneurs and makers, we should be a little more realistic about our relationship with IP. You can't always have your cake and eat it, too.
I don't think people hate google for offering proprietary mapping, but nobody wants to be subjected to unnecessary leverage.
For example, I wanted to use google in a commercial application, but only for backend services like geocoding and place search. I wanted to pay them for these services, but they refused the business because I did not want to display the data on a google map and use the google js api.
That is the sort of thing a company with lots of leverage can do. I wanted to pay full price or more to use a feature (10s of thousands per year), but due to a monopoly on the data, they can turn me away. Sorry, but I already have to deal with one Comcast.
> Being both entrepreneurs and makers, we should be a little more realistic about our relationship with IP. You can't always have your cake and eat it, too.
Why not? We can always demand more, and what is wrong with that? And if we set out to make and eat that cake, chances are we can do it. It is not unrealistic at all. So far crowdsourcing has worked really well for many projects, and I can only see it getting bigger as we as a community realize the potential of open data and our ability to collect & manage it in numbers that few companies can afford to challenge.
The point made by GP is a perfectly valid one, and many of us have been screwed in some way or another by corporations that hold the keys. I do not see why playing along with such schemes has anything to do with being realistic.
The problem is that corporations are not just satisfied with making a profit but tend to progress towards squeezing the last penny out of users at all costs. For example, Google is rolling out tracking which stores Android phones visit, and if you turn location services off, a lot of things including Google Now stop working[1]. Why would I want to work for free on improving maps so they can track where people go for advertising purposes? It is the difference between contributing to Wikipedia versus Encyclopaedia Brittanica.Not to mention doing user hostile things like making ads look like search results[3]
>That's precisely what Google is trying to achieve with its mapping initiative. The firm is investing heavily in community tools (not to mention SDKs for developers) that give us an opportunity to participate: posting, querying and modifying data.
So is OpenStreetMap, Navteq(commercial again) [2] and other mapping companies. Atleast Navteq/Nokia allows you to download complete offlline maps for their Here maps on supported devices unlike Google which wants to force people to be online for tracking/advertising purposes.
Precisely. I remember when the track names for some of my CDs vanished because CDDB had taken the data I created for for them private and I was no longer able to see the information I typed in.
