alt Hacker NewsMany longtime OSM mappers have sensed that there has been some decline in interest and a risk to the long-term future of the project as a truly amateur-enthusiast phenomenon. Causes include: younger generations raised on corporate platforms and their phone apps are less aware of non-corporate alternatives, and might even be suspicious of libre and altruistic movements (this is a concern in Free Software circles, too); as the map got filled in, there were fewer obvious blanks that struck a total newbie as a place he/she could contribute; corporations got onboard both as OSM users and stakeholders, and then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps, too, etc.
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Many longtime OSM mappers like myself are acutely aware of various corporations making big bucks on the back of our volunteered time and effort. Often times without contributing anything. Recently made worse by horrible API abuses.
I get why people might not be motivated to join us in the tragedy of the commons.
I personally think most people become disengaged from the side of things like OSM because they literally don't have visibility to the problem. It becomes even worse when there are literally trillions of dollars of market value derives from the good work of open source, but people only see the badge of product and not all of the layers of onion beneath it.
I really wish the world recognized and provided tax income to these projects because they have been the backbone of our ever-complex technological society for probably about thirty years. Rather than what we have now where large corporations will take a foothold in an open-source project and hollow it out for parts then sell it as a "turnkey" product like we have seen time and time again.
The kids are alright (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Zeloof). They are putting up more of a fight than you can imagine. The root cause of centralization is the way we do hardware manufacturing (as explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49690354). I think it will take about 5 years to make fabs into home appliances, then the entire stack will decentralize from the bottom up. The future is most likely solar/cypherpunk, at least in America.
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> younger generations raised on corporate platforms and their phone apps are less aware of non-corporate alternatives
All the new guys I work with are trapped in the app store/play store bubble. If it's not available directly through the device's software distribution system it's not getting used.
> might even be suspicious of libre and altruistic movements
All my boomer bosses think that anything that is outside the Windows/O365 ecosystem, or doesn't come with a $150 yearly license, is clearly pirate hacker software that will give your e-mail a virus and steal your bitcoin.
It is increasingly frustrating when we have a problem that could be fixed with GNU corutils and a bash script, or a raspberrypi/arduino translating between 2 serial devices, but we end up getting some $1500 black box from the 'official' vendor. It teaches the newer guys that step one is not to think about the problem, it's to grab your wallet and call a salesman.
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speaking of OSM... I've been part of teams at _certain country_'s _certain municipalities_ and teams working on GIS projects. so little among those people, who consume OSM content on a daily basis, even think about giving back, that even though I am not an OSM contributor, I start to get outraged at their total ignorance and disregard for crowd-sourced content, and the fact that someone put some work to have it there. same people are then getting royalties delivering this content to third parties. this is so wrong on so many levels, and I can't think of a way to make it work in a future where data is more precious than software packages.
OSM is still too difficult to contribute to for mass engagement. I spent an entire day trying to figure out how I could contribute fixes to the map for my corner of the country. There are 30 roads nearby with inaccuracies that would take me weeks to correct by hand. That could be fixed easily if there was a convenient app that recorded my driving and uploaded it to a central source, processed it, and converted that into edits for me to confirm. Such a system might exist, but I wasn't able to figure out where it was or how to use it. If they want more users to contribute the system needs to be easier. Same for Wikis.
New opportunities and directions open up all the time! AI is opening a whole new salient to attack the gatekeepers.
Craft is Wikipedia / OSM for software. We're building an open source AI software factory to agentically remake everything.
We're going to open source all the apps, turn platforms into protocols, build open infra, and help assist open weights.
Everything will be rewritten as high quality open source software. And once we've covered the space of everything people use, we'll turn the components into highly reusable open source libraries that can be reshaped into new workflows in real time.
We're going to make a seamless bridge between local and cloud AI, we're going to make a rich set of primitives for fine tuning and sharing.
Not just applications. Data, infra, hardware, the whole of technology.
I was done with OSM within a few days. I fixed some streams to be in the right place, reverted.
This post box is no longer there. "I'll drive round and check", "no need I'm stood there, it has gone". "I'll drive round tomorrow"...I got the impression i was on someone else's patch and gave up
> then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps, too
”We should respect freedoms and not restrict them arbitrarily… except when I do not like the people using those freedoms.“
It is always a weird take to me. Pick a license that matches your preferences, like the GPL. Do not pick MIT/whatever and then complain when corps make use of the freedoms you afforded them.
> corporations got onboard both as OSM users and stakeholders, and then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps,
Anecdotally, I’ve had a lot of experiences like this with newer generations of people on topics like open source software or community projects: They’ve been trained, usually by a social media niche, to believe that the only good fight is to actively harm corporations. Their idea of the world is a very clear black and white contrast with people on one side and corporations on the other.
Such a clean separation of the world only exists in ideas they get from social media and movies. Encountering a project like OSM or an open source project where the largest users (and for OSS, maybe the largest contributors) are people involved with corporations doesn’t fit into their worldview, so they file it in the “corporate” side of the divide and dislike it.