One man determined to tackle Google Maps, 20 years later OpenStreetMap continues to be going sturdy
From internet protocols and operating systems, to databases and cloud services, some expertise is so omnipresent most individuals do not even comprehend it exists. The identical might be mentioned about OpenStreetMap, the community-driven platform that serves corporations and software program builders with geographic knowledge and maps to allow them to rely rather less on the proprietary incumbents within the house. Sure, that principally means Google.
OpenStreetMap is the handiwork of Steve Coast (pictured above), a College School London “dropout” (Coast’s personal phrases) who has since gone on to work in numerous map- and location-related roles at Microsoft, TomTom, Telenav, and — as of at this time — Singaporean ride-hailing firm Grab.
Coast is not straight concerned on a day-to-day foundation at OpenStreetMap any extra, however in a blog post on Friday marking his creation’s twentieth anniversary, he acknowledged two previous success tales from the open supply realm that satisfied him that one thing like OpenStreetMap might need legs.
“20 years in the past, I knew {that a} wiki map of the world would work,” Coast wrote. “It appeared apparent in gentle of the success of Wikipedia and Linux. However I did not know that OpenStreetMap would work till a lot later.”
Whereas OpenStreetMap is a little bit like Wikipedia for maps, the comparability with its encyclopaedic counterpart is considerably superficial. Certain, they’re each gargantuan collaborative tasks, however there’s a world of distinction between sharing your geeky data of micronations and mapping out geographic options on a world scale.
Immediately, OpenStreetMap claims greater than 10 million contributors who map out and fine-tune every little thing from streets and buildings, to rivers, canyons and every little thing else that constitutes our constructed and pure environments. The place to begin for all that is knowledge derived from numerous sources, together with publicly obtainable and donated aerial imagery and maps, sourced from governments and personal organizations such as Microsoft. Contributors can manually add and edit knowledge by way of OpenStreetMap’s editing tools, they usually may even enterprise out into the wild and map an entire new space out by themselves utilizing GPS, which is helpful if a brand new road crops up, for instance.
As sole creator, Coast was the driving power behind all of the early software program growth and advocacy work, ultimately organising the U.Okay.-based non-profit OpenStreetMap Foundation to supervise the undertaking in 2006. Immediately, the Basis is supported primarily by donations and memberships, with less than a dozen volunteer board members (who’re elected by members) steering key choices and managing funds. The Basis counts only a single worker — a system engineer — and a handful of contractors who present administrative and accounting assist.
OpenStreetMap’s Open Database License (ODbL) permits any third-party to make use of its knowledge with the suitable attribution (although this attribution would not all the time occur). This consists of big-name corporations such as Apple and VC-backed unicorns like MapBox, by way of a who’s who of tech corporations together with Uber and Strava, the latter tapping OpenStreetMap knowledge for roads, trails, parks, factors of curiosity, and extra.
Extra not too long ago, the Overture Maps Basis — an initiative backed by Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and TomTom — has leaned heavily on OpenStreetMap data as a part of its personal efforts to construct a viable various to Google’s walled mapping backyard.
There’s little query that OpenStreetMap has been successful these previous 20 years, successful that would not have been attainable with out the web and folks’s need to create one thing beneficial that is owned by everybody.
“OpenStreetMap managed to map the world and provides the info away at no cost for nearly no cash in any respect,” Coast notes. “It managed to sidestep virtually all the issues that Wikipedia has by advantage of solely representing info not opinions. If OpenStreetMap is a medium, what’s the message? For me it’s that we will go from nothing to one thing, or zero to at least one.”
Apart from affordability and accessibility, there may be at the very least one different good purpose why an open map dataset ought to exist, and all of it comes all the way down to the notion of who will get to “personal” location. Ought to company juggernauts corresponding to Google actually get to manage all of it? By any affordable estimation, a location monopoly just isn’t a optimistic factor for society.
As OpenStreetMap contributor and free software program advocate Serge Wroclawski notes: “Place is a shared useful resource, and once you give all that energy to a single entity, you’re giving them the facility not solely to let you know about your location, however to form it.”
