@simon@en.osm.town avatar

simon

@simon@en.osm.town

Father, jack of many trades, open data cynic. Somewhat involved with OpenStreetMap

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

luis_in_brief, to random
@luis_in_brief@social.coop avatar

This sentiment is such a recurring sentiment for so many people who try to work in good faith with open communities. That sucks.
https://mastodon.social/@migurski/112360700602208937

simon,
@simon@en.osm.town avatar

@luis_in_brief do I really need to dig out all the relevant material? Essentially all the friction was due to dev egos and the abuse was the other way around.

simon,
@simon@en.osm.town avatar

@luis_in_brief definitely some questionable expectations on both sides, but the point was that cooperation with Mapbox worked well at that time.

simon, to random
@simon@en.osm.town avatar

1/3

The French edition of ZDnet has a short piece on panoramax https://www.zdnet.fr/blogs/l-esprit-libre/commun-numerique-panoramax-une-base-de-photos-de-vues-de-terrain-immersives-390872.htm which has the potential to make street level imagery no longer a domain solely under the control of FAANG.

Because it can provide data protection tailored to national legislation, it further has the potential to free up the large amount of imagery held by cities and municipalities that currently isn't made public due to legal concerns.

...

simon, to random
@simon@en.osm.town avatar

If you really want to get upset about something going on in open source / open data space, I would suggest considering Niantic.

After years of refusing any communication with , not to mention -any- kind of support. Niantic joined the Linux Foundations @linuxfoundation Overture (for substantial amounts of money), but its customers continue to vandalize OSM, burning lots of volunteer time at multiple levels.

https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/beware-of-fake-beaches-pokemon-go/112413

seav, to infosec
@seav@en.osm.town avatar

The security of the worldwide information technology infrastructure sadly rests on tons of unpaid open source developers. 😦

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24119342/xz-utils-linux-backdoor-attempt

simon,
@simon@en.osm.town avatar

@seav that is actually hyperbole

simon, to random
@simon@en.osm.town avatar

@openstreetmap the OSMF website has been broken for at least a couple of days. Unluckily there doesn't seem to be a public repository or issue tracker for it, or any other way of reporting problems.

richlv, to random
@richlv@mastodon.social avatar

Another wholesome changeset discussion where a new mapper gets some help and ends with "Big thank you!" :)

It's a bit longer, would have to read it on osm.org:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/148738302

simon,
@simon@en.osm.town avatar

@richlv @gileri that reminded me to create an issue for https://github.com/MarcusWolschon/osmeditor4android/issues/2533 something I wanted to add to @vespucci_editor 20 but ran out of time to do.

It is a real pain here as tens of 1000s of buildings were added way back from Bing imagery, but all of them have gone through multiple iterations of improvements from better sources (but still have the source=Bing tag).

simon, to random
@simon@en.osm.town avatar

Every dev can relate to this https://youtu.be/FAdmpAZTH_M?si=VvA2iDedhJfLyEPf unluckily it can't be force pushed away 😎

simon, to random
@simon@en.osm.town avatar

@josh fwiw unhappy element/matrix user (in German) https://chaos.social/@isotopp/111923386133739324

simon, to random
@simon@en.osm.town avatar

🍿 time:
https://github.com/IABTechLab/uid2docs/pull/16

simon,
@simon@en.osm.town avatar

@seav it is very convenient for tracking who is misusing your e-mail address and for that quite popular as a source for burner e-mail addresses.

simon, to random
@simon@en.osm.town avatar

While I was generating some numbers on editor usage yesterday (for the @geomob podcast we just recorded and maybe for a diary post too), I noticed a massive (at least in OSM terms) anomaly in the newbie signup rates for RapiD (Facebooks iD fork). In February 2023 it rocketed up to nearly 3'000 to then return to the previous couple of dozen per month.

Anybody know the background here?

kathleenthelaw, to random
@kathleenthelaw@mastodon.social avatar

As Chair of the the @openstreetmap Foundation's Legal/License Working Group, I posted about why EU governments should release data under @creativecommons's CC0 in furtherance of the EU Open Data Directive.

https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2023/11/25/the-cc-0-advantage-how-the-eu-open-data-directive-can-benefit-from-simplified-licensing-for-geodata/

Thanks to @tjl and the rest of the LWG for 🖊️

simon,
@simon@en.osm.town avatar

@nemobis
The point is that using CC 4.0 for OGD, because of the restrictions that go far beyond just requiring attribution, doesn't even acheive what the regulation sets out to do.

As @kathleenthelaw points out isn't a government and other considerations apply.

PS: it isn't as if the EU wasn't made aware of the issues multiple times.

simon,
@simon@en.osm.town avatar

@nemobis the (sui generis) database rights clauses in CC BY 4.0 are not the issue (they do lead to additional problems as in the licence could actually work as a licence in the EU see https://discuss.okfn.org/t/maintenance-and-future-of-the-open-data-commons-licences/4460/31 ) The consequences of the anti-DRM clauses are present in all versions.

There are lots of reasons why CC0 is a non-starter for OSM ranging from 3rd party data that requires attribution (wikidata takes the usual US off-shore white washing approach) to respecting community sentiment.

simon,
@simon@en.osm.town avatar

@nemobis ... and the public sector shouldn't have an interest in keeping the data unfettered/free downstream as the whole point is creating an environment in which the data can be taken and anything can be done with it including using it in proprietary datasets.

OSM on the other hand wants participation back from data users (which is not a realistic thing with typical OGD).

simon,
@simon@en.osm.town avatar

@nemobis it makes the licence enforceable?

Note to the lawyers reading this for the sake of brevity lots of caveats omitted that should really be made.

simon,
@simon@en.osm.town avatar

@mw @nemobis this has literally been discussed to death.

There's no point in me repeating a good 14 years of discussion, decisions and experience here. OSM adopted the ODbL fully aware of the pros and cons, and fully aware of the legal situation (oh gosh, yes, they were not stupid dimwits). Literally everything on the topic is available in the OSMF and mailing lists archives.

It's a compromise, and as such has served the project surprisingly well, despite the odd wart.

zverik, to random
@zverik@en.osm.town avatar

While riding on a bus, I remembered we have an ongoing vandalism in Russia and Israel on the map. Folks fighting it are heroes, and it's great seeing our infrastructure harden. That what wars do, after all.

But, mapping-wise.

(Sorry for the rant)

I spoke about our inability to deal with large scale imports in 2017 ("How to break OSM"). You though it was a joke?

I proposed improvements to API and data model in 2019 to mitigate that. Starting with "area datatype? are you even serious".

simon,
@simon@en.osm.town avatar

@zverik ED == iD?

So your argument is that it is our fault, for some unclear reason, that the corporate QA tools were/are never made available to

For example like the @linuxfoundation QA toolchain for the Overture Map Foundation?

Which BTW makes the OMF unforkable? A surprise from the LF, well actually not.

simon,
@simon@en.osm.town avatar

@zverik that comparison is, very, flawed as you know. Not only has the WMFs distribution model always been very different from OSMs, it has always been the major end user distribution point for its data, contrary to OSM.

simon,
@simon@en.osm.town avatar

@zverik The other point is that the sustainable thing to do from the OSMFs point of view is to financially support, or facilitate such support for the default website embedded editor, currently iD, before that P1 and P2.

It is not only by far the major funnel for onboarding new contributors it is also the major driver of conversion to longer term larger contributors. Nothing else comes close.

There's a -lot- more to say about that though.

simon, to random
@simon@en.osm.town avatar

The difference

Yesterday afternoon we at @SwissOSM received a complaint from a company using OSM to display their locations on a map that one of them was marked in the wrong place.

By 9am today they had not only received a response pointing out that the address was correct in OSM, they also got a pointer that they had likely simply switched digits in the house number when they were geocoding the address for display (54 -> 45) ...

zverik, to random
@zverik@en.osm.town avatar

Rain non-stop in Antwerp. Bring an umbrella.

simon,
@simon@en.osm.town avatar

@zverik expected (why do you think I'm not turning up before Friday afternoon) and typically umbrellas don't help as (because location) it is always going to be at least a bit windy. When I lived nearby (aka AMS) we simply resigned to being wet.

josh, to opensource
@josh@josh.tel avatar

deleted_by_author

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    simon, (edited )
    @simon@en.osm.town avatar

    @josh we (as in the OSMF) use CivicCRM for membership management @grischard would have to comment on the pros and cons though.

    MapAmore, to random
    @MapAmore@en.osm.town avatar

    Do you know that the original founder of the project, Steve Coast, works for / Grab, as head of engineering, Geo Innovation ?

    https://grab.com/sg/enterprise-blog/discovering-new-models-of-mapping-with-steve-coast

    simon,
    @simon@en.osm.town avatar

    @seav @MapAmore nitpicking but it is the 5th time not the third, it will be the 3rd unsuccessful bid in a row though.

    simon, to random
    @simon@en.osm.town avatar

    BTW the end of August marked 10 years since the first release of @vespucci_editor that I authored https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SimonPoole/diary/19884 Here's a video from a couple of days earlier
    https://www.youtube.com/embed/FnU-b6EZ_sE

    At that time Vespucci was already 4 years old, and had already gone through a number of UI changes (yes next year it will be 15, definitely in teenager territory) and was in need of some love mainly because it didn't support relations at all and that was turning in to a real issue.

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