Cloudmade’s OpenStreetMap Project is Successful
April 17, 2010 7 Comments
I know many readers of my blog are very interested in the OpenStreetMap project so this news will all make you breath a sigh of relief. The great visionary Michael Arrington has the hot scoop:
Many people describe CloudMade’s OpenStreetMap project as “Wikipedia for maps,” and they aren’t far off. The project allows anyone to add and edit map data around the globe, and the project is now a viable open and free source of mapping data for third party developers.
CloudMade has allowed entire new classes of applications to be possible. In Germany 150,000 people have paid to download skobbler, which is based on data from OpenStreetMap. Countless other apps also use the data. One notably creative one – a gay cities app that shows the gay areas of cities around the world, with points of interest.
I’ve been a huge proponent of CloudMade’s OpenStreetMap project since the Cloudmade guys created it back in the day. Thus being a CloudMade OpenStreetMap participant for years, I’m glad to see that the CloudMade project is finally getting its due.
.
.
.
.
Ugh right? The whole “article” sounds like it was planted for CloudMade’s gain because to represent the OpenStreetMap project this way is a huge diservice to those of us who have put countless nights on improving the maps. Toss in one softball comment and we’ve got a hype project working.
The whole operation reminds me of a good YouTube video…
Update: In fairness to Cloudmade, they have clearly stated that they are not running the project.
I take two things away from this. Arrington doesn’t understand a thing about location and someone (a VC perhaps) is feeding Arrington bad information. It would appear the management of Cloudmade was unaware of this story so if there is something going on, it is outside of their knowledge.
I’m fairly sure both Steve and Nick wouldn’t represent CM this way so lets just go on the assumption Arrington and some wacko know nothing about anything.
About James Fee
That was pretty easy. Just used FakeMayor to show Arrington that I was mayor of OSM. Totally bought it. What a dumbass.
Maybe TechCrunch aren’t that far off the mark?
OSM isn’t strictly owned by Cloudmade – but it is really
OSM was started by by Steve Coast, who got fed up of not making any money from it, so he set up a company called Cloudmade to cash in. The problem was he (and his ‘foundation’ chums) had picked a CC-BY-SA license for OSM, really meant for music and artistic work, you have to share any work built upon OSM with the same license – doesn’t really make for a healthy business model! DOH. So they set up Cloudmade and set about changing the license so they could make some money – the problem with the CC license is it’s irrevocable. So one day, Cloudmade and their customers may end up with a big legal bill and OSM may just survive, perhaps as art.
Fake Steve
If you were the real FakeSteveC and not some fake then you would know that while the new license allows one to retain rights to the final product made with OSM data, it requires one to share any database built from OSM. This change in license means that CloudMade (and anyone else) will be allowed to restrict use of their map tiles, but they will have to release the database from which they create them (including, for example, simplified geometries which today they can compute and keep for themselves). The proposed license change in OSM is governed by a proper community process. Contrary to what you seem to be hinting at, nobody wants to revoke any license; existing data remains under CC-BY-SA forever. Contributors will be asked to agree to the license change and if they don’t, their data will not be published under the new license – as easy as that. There will neither be huge legal bills nor a threat to the survival of OSM.
Having said that, Arrington’s original article and especially his refusal to accept his mistake are an ugly stain on TechCrunch’s reputation if there ever was any. As a mapper from Germany, where OSM has prospered without CloudMade involvement, I am surprised that Arrington should pick Germany as an example for “CloudMade’s success” and I can only put that down to very shoddy research because CloudMade themselves are surely making that claim.
…that would be another bowel movement then Frederik?
Wow…Arrington spewed out waaaaay more B.S. in that “article” than that horrible trumpet player probably did his whole musical career. What an arrogant putz.
Pingback: geographika » GeoJSON Where are You?