this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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If they used Google maps, Niantic would have to pay Google. That's no Bueno. Why pay for content critical to your apps success when you could just freeload on volunteers work instead?
I know this seems like Niantic is free-loading, but this is intentionally-allowed by the ODbL license and honestly, might be a good business decision even without considering the licensing fees. OSM is almost 20 years old and as a community led project, is probably more predictable and stable than a Google license which could change drastically from one contract to the next.
As a OSM contributor, I'm more than happy to see my work used this way, and as @[email protected] pointed out, OSM has seen a lot of benefit too.
Yeah, and the consequence of them using the dataset is massive amounts of people contribute useful data to the project. It is a fair exchange in my opinion. There are lots of reasons to hate Pokemon Go, but this isn't one of them. You can use the maps too, and they are far better as a result of PGO using them.
Don't get any changes reviewed before , you know, really replacing map data ? I'm just curious. There are a lot of players worldwide, I can imagine the game going strong for another few years and OSM ending up choke full of areas that were pokemon'd and made unusable.
"Made unusable": that's not how it works. Even with occasional vandalism, there's so much more people positively contributing, that overall the map just keeps on getting better and better.
I'm a pretty junior contributor (I spent a couple years completing quests on StreetComplete and only have been adding new buildings, etc for a few weeks). I don't know a ton about how the organization is run, so I can only talk from my experiences. I've been able to upload changes which will be live before they will be reviewed. I know there are reviewers who go through areas regularly, but they definitely don't cover everywhere. I'm not sure if OSM has the ability to lockdown areas with frequent vandalism.
From what I can tell, changes are just uploaded immediately. I think If someone adds wrong data, another contributor can revert it.
Part of -- if not the primary point -- of OSM is that people can use its database in their projects. That's a feature, not a bug. They could have very readily restricted commercial use of the database and chose not to do so.
I would have been far less-willing to contribute if it weren't a resource available to everyone.
Pokemon Go brought more users to OSM, so there was definitely some mutual benefit going on.
Vandals, yes, but plenty of legit contributers, too.
Niantic is a Google spinoff, and the data they generated for Ingress was used for Google Maps. I'm surprised they don't have a special deal with Google.
Google doesn't own most of their map data - they license it off other companies that have spent decades and billions of dollars collecting map data from all around the world.
So even if Google gives a project a "special deal" it's still not going to be free. Open Street Map, on the other hand, is totally free. And in some ways it's better than Google Maps — because it has millions of people contributing to the map. No commercial mapping company can come close to the level of detail OSM has. Compare these two screenshots — the Google map has so much less detail it's not even recognisable as the same place. Roads and major features are missing or drawn in the wrong place.
Google maps also has bad data for many places. My home address is the wrong street name. Google maps says it's "Drive", when it's "Court". It's been that way for 22 years apparently. Google is the only one that has it wrong. I've submitted 10 tickets to fix it, they keep denying the change.
Waze, Fixed it myself. OSM, did have it wrong about a year ago (before I moved in) was corrected when apparently a current OSM board member imported a cluster of addresses from the National Address Database.
Apple has it right. Bing maps has it right... Every other source has it right. Google maps just sucks.
What's worse is that many companies use google's dataset for address validation. Since my address doesn't "exist" according to the omniscient google, I'm just screwed when I enter my address on those sites.
Also that you don't want to be depending on Google's products if you don't want to revamp every 2~3 years
Google Maps Api has been reliable for a very long time.
Google ain't stupid, they know which products they can google around and which not. Google Ads, Analytics and Maps customers are too valuable for them.