OpenStreetMap: Welcome Apple

http://blog.osmfoundation.org/2012/03/08/welcome-apple/

by sambeau • 14 years ago

364 151 14 years ago

blog.osmfoundation.org

sambeau• 14 years ago

  "It’s also missing the necessary credit to OpenStreetMap’s
   contributors; we look forward to working with Apple to get
   that on there."

sdoering5• 14 years ago

Why is that, that if Apple ignores credit/copyright (on a massive scale), that everybody loves their move.

But if anybody would rip of an Apple product, the descendants of mighty Steve would come raining down with swords, axes and lawyers.

Do you really think they did it, to support OSM. Or should I ask myself: "Where is the money?"

The money, they do not have to pay Google anymore for the use of maps, while not crediting all these people, who supported OSM with their time and data-collecting.

ticks• 14 years ago

Better to approach these things positively, than assume the worst case and risk creating resentment.

LaGrange• 14 years ago

I think the thing you might be witnessing here is what earthlings call "sarcasm," or maybe "a thinly veiled threat". I'm not entirely sure which one.

ot• 14 years ago

> Why is that, that if Apple ignores credit/copyright (on a massive scale), that everybody loves their move.

It actually sounds very passive-aggressive to me.

sdoering5• 14 years ago

Well I was just wondering, how many voices are raised in defending a coop, that is known for its love of details, but forgets to mention these tiny little humans, that gathered the data in the first place. </sarcasm>

It seems to me, that the Apple-Folks in Cupertino knew exactly, what they were doing. Who would sue Apple in a case like this anyway?

Being from Germany, I have no idea, what the US-System would look like, but I believe, that suing Apple would mean, that every one of the contributors to OSM would have to sue on his/her own.

And who would do that?

Apple would calculate this. And even, if some people would walk this way, it might still be cheaper, than paying Google.

Just my two cents.

orblivion3• 14 years ago

> Do you really think they did it, to support OSM. Or should I ask myself: "Where is the money?"

To this very particular point I want to say, I think that large companies switching over to open technologies (edit: because of a profit motive) is a good thing. There needs to be a critical mass of people who value the openness per se in order for the sea change to happen, but ultimately it has to be because we make it more profitable to do so. I have zero expectations that a bunch of CEOs are going to start caring about any cause. If they switch over, it means we're succeeding in making it profitable, and I take that as a good sign.

cicloid• 14 years ago

Could the credits be embedded in the copyright for the software/eula/about in the App?

The GIStiquette, seems to imply that there is almost always some copyright in the footer of the map.

Could this copyright be embedded in the documentation (à la MIT) and still comply?

Angostura• 14 years ago

I wondered that too. I don't have the app, but I would bet that Settings > General > About > Legal Notices would be the place to look?

olt• 14 years ago

Well, the license (CC-By-SA) requires that "The credit required by this Section 4(c) may be implemented in any reasonable manner;". So it doesn't need to be in the footer of the map, when there is no footer at all ("at least as prominent as the credits for the other contributing authors"), but I think the EULA/about not reasonable.

But other people might disagree. There are even people that think the whole license is invalid and that it can be used as Public Domain, because the license is for creative work and not meant to be used for databases. This is the major reason OSM is changing to a different license right now (ODbL).

Edit: See here http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/Why_CC_BY-SA_is_Un...

ElliotH• 14 years ago

While I think it's quite messed up that a company as rich as Apple can't abide putting credits for people who have put some really good work in (I've even made small updates to OSM in my time) I do think that this is a very classy move by the OSM people, no ranting blog post or 'Apple stole our stuff', welcoming people presents a much better image of the project.

afterburner• 14 years ago

Given the behaviour of Steve Jobs over the years, that attitude is probably embedded in the culture.

rmc22• 14 years ago

Attribution is required by the OSM copyright licence.

flyt• 14 years ago

If OpenStreetMap ends up like the KHTML -> WebKit ascendancy then things could be very good for their team in the future.

JumpCrisscross2• 14 years ago

It was for stealth. This does not absolve them of their legal and ethical responsibility to give credit where it's due, but it explains their actions above "they're dicks".

April 2010 is around when they would have started working on the maps back-end. Attribution would have meant dev releases would have indicated Apple using non-Google Maps data. They probably wanted to avoid that.

ecopoesis2• 14 years ago

Does Apple legally have to give credit? I thought facts couldn't be copyrighted (from the MLB vs fantasy baseball case - http://www.patentarcade.com/2007/11/case-cbc-v-major-league-...) and wouldn't map data qualify as facts?

georgemcbay• 14 years ago

IANAL but from what I understand "facts" can't be copyrighted, but a collection of facts can be.

eg. A business' address/phone number can't be copyrighted on its own, but a specific collection of them into a Yellow Pages can be.

jaakl• 14 years ago

Map qualifies as "set of facts" just as much as a photograph of something is representation of a fact. So no, maps are not facts. It is quite subjective model of the world. I would say that OSM is huge collaborative piece of art, and I'm proud to be one of the artists there.

rmc22• 14 years ago

There are some licence and copyright matters to be dealt with, but it's good to see another company switch to OpenStreetMap

tseabrooks2• 14 years ago

It feels a bit silly to fawn over map tiles... and I'll probably be accused of being an "Apple Fanboy"... But I'll be damned if those aren't some gorgeous tiles.

Hopefully, this signals apple will move away from google for the built in maps app and provide something superior themselves with something comparable to the kick ass turn by turn in the current Android devices.

randallsquared• 14 years ago

One of these is far nicer and clearer than the other:

http://alastaira.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/image3.png

http://alastaira.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/image4.png

Apple's version comes up really lacking in comparison to the default OSM one, which I would call gorgeous, personally.

dochtman• 14 years ago

Meh. I love what OSM is doing, but IMO their tile style doesn't hold a candle to Google's (but then I dislike Apple's style here, as well).

tseabrooks2• 14 years ago

I find the OSM one to be way way to busy. I think the Google tiles provide better information clarity + attractiveness value. However, I still maintain those new apple tiles are gorgeous, the way an antique map is gorgeous. I never claimed it provided more information; It's clearly providing less information. But aesthetics and function are separate vectors.

RandallBrown• 14 years ago

OSM is trying to give you directions, Apple is trying to show you the general area of where a photo was taken. I like that Apple is throwing away some of the information to make it look a little nicer. In a map app though, this would be stupid.

Shank• 14 years ago

I thought someone compared the terrain with OSM and in certain locations it differs?

Edit: They're apparently combining map data in some places.

rmc22• 14 years ago

OSM doesn't have "terrain" (as in hill shading and mountain slopes), but it does have streets and roads. Apple and OSM match up in lots of places.

Apple are not using OSM in USA (maybe canada, i dunno), but are definitly using it outside there.

ZeroGravitas2• 14 years ago

OSM does have terrain, just not in the default map render (which includes most hand-editible data to aid contributers but is often assumed to be the single intended end product). For elevation they re-use SRTM data (and other sources) to create maps with shaded slopes or contours:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/SRTM

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Shaded_relief_maps_using_...

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contours

simonecortesi• 14 years ago

Apple data is about one year old, this is the reason behind the spotted differences.

rmc22• 14 years ago

2 years old actually. Dated to about first week of April 2010 (based on "this road added on $DATE1 is there and the road added on $DATE2 isn't"). They are also using non-OSM data for the USA

5h• 14 years ago

This is (for me) a very timely validation of OSMs efforts, congrats to them!

dbkbali• 14 years ago

Great Apple, do no evil! How can we get better coverage for Asia?

rmc22• 14 years ago

With OSM, just start mapping! It's a wiki! http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Beginners%27_guide

toyg• 14 years ago

That won't help Apple users though -- OP points out that the map data is stale (possibly two years old). It suggests there was a one-off dump at some point which was then used to build the service.

ugh5• 14 years ago

Then congratulations Apple, for making a not so great map even worse. I can't really judge map quality in the US, but in Germany it sucks. Cities show up twice or are missing completely, labels are often small, unreadable and ugly. There is no consistency in the placement of lables.

OSM has its fair share of inconsistencies but it's not that bad.

The map is ok for what it is: Just for presentation inside of iPhoto, not for browsing or finding your way. I really hope that Apple doesn't plan to use this anywhere else and hat they just didn't go with Google because they can't customize their maps any way they want.

(That missing credit is also shameful. I was looking everywhere inside of iPhoto but couldn't find it. Stuff like that sould at least be moderately easy to find.)

NameNickHN2• 14 years ago

> but in Germany it sucks

That's funny. A German client of mine specifically asked me to put an OpenStreetMap map right next to the Google Map because the details of OpenStreetMap were more precise. The client creates POI geo coordinates and uses the maps to find the best position for a poi.

ugh5• 14 years ago

I don't know what's going on there. OSM does have lots of detail for Germany and the problems with OSM are more general ones with the consistency of label placement and such. No map breaking stuff.

Apple's tiles, however have more glaring mistakes (double labels, missing labels).

rmc22• 14 years ago

Apple's labels are strange, they aren't from OSM, but some other source. There are numerous differences between OSM labels and Apple labels.

ceejayoz• 14 years ago

According to the post, Apple's using an old version of the OSM data set.

funkah• 14 years ago

I don't know much about OSM, but I saw a comparison of the new map tiles in iPhoto with the same place in Google, and Google's seemed much more detailed. I know Apple is doing this to remove dependencies on G but I fear it could be a bit of a regression. I hope I'm wrong. In iPhoto that's not such a big deal, but other apps rely on the map much more.

smackfu• 14 years ago

I didn't even think it was good enough for iPhoto. On one of my photos (in the US), it showed some random town label that I wouldn't consider correct, zooming out didn't add any new labels, and it took forever to download any new tiles.

tcard• 14 years ago

Out of curiosity, I made a comparison between the two towns where most of my photos are taken as seen in GMaps vs. OSM.

http://cl.ly/133M1H3W2W362S2F0l13 http://cl.ly/2P2d3y042N1T0o2p390H

600k and 60k inhabitants respectively.

Gring• 14 years ago

Interesting. From your screenshots, Apple's maps are so bad it's not even funny. It's just very, very bad. Steve would've never allowed such a thing to ship.

Is this a first sign that without an asshole with taste at the top, the erosion of Apple is inevitable?

demallien• 14 years ago

As others have noted, Apple seem to be generating their own tiles from OSM data. ArsTechnica has a good screenshot here:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/03/apple-begins-using...

happycube• 14 years ago

Dang... that makes GMaps look like Bing ;)

In my town (Santa Barbara, CA) OSM looks decent - not as many details as GMaps, but more than some others...

ErneX• 14 years ago

Also Spain has errors, they call the Madrid area "Los Madriles" which is pretty funny.

orblivion3• 14 years ago

> Then congratulations Apple, for making a not so great map even worse. I can't really judge map quality in the US, but in Germany it sucks.

That's very disappointing to hear. I understood that it was ever better than Google Maps in some parts of Europe.

lbotos2• 14 years ago

In my short time playing with openstreetmap I learned that openstreetmap is more of a spec/aggregate/foundation entity that seems to be grouping "open street mapping" efforts under their banner. It's more of a spec than a single data source. I learned this when I had to go elsewhere (government sites and colleges) to find "open" street mapping data. It's was a little confusing to say the least and I still may be misunderstanding their actual position, but that's what I've learned.

derda• 14 years ago

In my city it is way more detailed than gmaps. Even the smallest trails in the local park are in there, also cross-country ski runs in the mountains. I trust OSM will pretty much all my hiking plans.

The only thing that was missing in my city were a few house-numbers in some streets close to my apartment. So I went out and fixed it.

NameNickHN2• 14 years ago

There are two things that Apple should do in order to avoid being viewed as a jerk once again. Put in the credit to OpenStreetMap and make a sizable donation to the OpenStreetMaps Foundation.

sdoering5• 14 years ago

Not only credit to OSM. They would have to credit every single contributor (whos data is used).

rmc22• 14 years ago

Not really. Yes the Licence is CC-BY-SA, but "OpenStreetMap Contributors" is accepted form. (cf. http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright )

rmc22• 14 years ago

Apple must give attribution, not to be nice, but to avoid being guilty of copyright infringment.

chpolk• 14 years ago

With many of these larger map-based apps switching to OpenStreetMap, does anyone know any apps that receive a large amount of traffic that are currently/going to stay with Google Maps? And if so, how are they dealing with the charges (is it doable with a large amount of traffic without a significant source of revenue)?

MRonney• 14 years ago

The map for my hometown shows a train station that hasn't existed since the early 1900's.

SoftwareMaven2• 14 years ago

If it's in the current OSM db, you should fix it. That's the great thing about OSM.

bergie• 14 years ago

Yep, and it is even very easy: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/openstreetmap-s_user-generated_dat...

dutchbrit• 14 years ago

Someone at Apple definitely deserves a good spanking..

petsos• 14 years ago

I wonder if this is a temporary quick and dirty solution from Apple, pending a full-scale switch to their own maps in iOS 6.0.

rmc22• 14 years ago

"Their own maps"? These are their maps. They are rendering them, they are hosting them. If you mean "their own map data", then that would be silly (& expensive) for Apple to either (a) drive a car around everywhere like Google Street View or (b) licence some third party mapping company. OSM is a good solution for Apple here.

forza• 14 years ago

They did buy c3 technologies so they are probably up to something map related.

pkulak• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure they can afford to buy their own map data. What would be nice, though, is if they put the cash into fixing up OSM. Somewhat like what they did with KHTML.

skeletonjelly• 14 years ago

Right. Because they don't have the cash to do these things. Expensive is relative.

dan12342• 14 years ago

Has it been confirmed that they're using OSM data or could the data be a product of their acquisition of Placebase (back in 2009)?

Apple have actually been using this tile set for a while (it's used in the slide show mode of the current version of iPhoto for OS X).

rmc22• 14 years ago

Yes, it looks like OSM. There are small roads that I've mapped that are only on OSM, and are present on these maps. The data from OSM is from april 2010 (based on "The road added to OSM on $DATE1 is on these appple tiles, but the the road added on $DATE2 isn't")

And yes, it looks like they've been using it for a while, no-one noticed till now.

megablast2• 14 years ago

> And yes, it looks like they've been using it for a while, no-one noticed till now.

What do you mean by that? This is all from software released today, right?

nchlswu• 14 years ago

Could someone clarify using a service like OSM or Google Maps vs. using their data for map tiles?

After the announcement I read tweets that basically said Apple was still using the Google Maps service, but the tiles were rendered by Apple?

Based on what I'm reading it sounds like I misunderstood or am misremembering what I read.

rmc22• 14 years ago

Some of Apple's software is still using Google Maps. Some is use tiles that Apple render and host, but based on OpenStreetMap data. Basically 2 years ago someone download the OSM data base (you can get it here http://planet.openstreetmap.org/ ), and then they made up their own style.

Metapony• 14 years ago

Link is down. I'd ask for a google cache link, but the irony would make me implode.

soult• 14 years ago

I don't know if you posted this just for pointing out the irony, or if you really don't know: Retrieving the website from the Google Cache is as easy as searching for "cache:FULL_URL" with Google, there isn't even a results page or anything, you get directly to the cached page.

mokus• 14 years ago

In addition to the attribution, I'd like to know how they are going to comply with the "share-alike" part of the license. Where can I download "Apple maps"? According to the OSM FAQ, it should contain not only the OSM data but all other data they have merged in.

It also seems like they should be required to release all the styling parameters and/or code needed to render the maps exactly as they appear in iPhoto - does anyone know how far CC-BY-SA reaches in a case like this?

EDIT: for that last part, I guess they probably would be fine just releasing the whole thing pre-rendered.

rmc22• 14 years ago

No-one really know how far CC goes, and that's one reason OSM is changing licence to a new Open Database Licence (ODbL)

oconnor0• 14 years ago

Why wouldn't CC cover this?

X-Istence• 14 years ago

The Apple tiles are completely missing the street I live on ...

sjg• 14 years ago

Well add it into OSM ;)

robertgaal• 14 years ago

How can a project this cool have such an ugly website? It's shit like this OSM...

JVIDEL• 14 years ago

What is the word I'm looking for, "disappointed"?

The lack of given credit to OSM doesn't seems like an accident, and I was looking forward to see what Apple was doing with that amazing mapping technology from SAAB.

This is underwhelming to say the least, I was expecting much more from Apple.

rmc22• 14 years ago

I presume the missing attribution was an accident. They cannot avoid it for much longer. It's legally required under the OSM copyright licence (CC-BY-SA)

jarek2• 14 years ago

Yeah. Apple isn't known for sweating the small stuff.

Accident my ass! Incompetence, at best. If this was Microsoft or Oracle, not Apple, HN would be grabbing their pitchforks in three seconds.

sharmi• 14 years ago

I see this as a favorable move to OSM. Hopefully the OSM's data would be enriched further considering the huge volume of people who would come in contact with OSM. OSM still lacks in a few places like middle east (Kuwait). But what was surprising was, wikimapia has several orders of magnitude better data for the same region compared to OpenStreetMap or other commercial map providers ( That includes google maps, yahoo maps etc )

phil2• 14 years ago

I don't get it. Where's the evidence that these maps are based on OSM data versus, say, Navteq or TeleAtlas data?

The tiles use terrain data that nobody thinks is from OSM, and when I look at North American cities, the street grids certainly don't seem to match any better than you'd expect.

This post sounds pretty confident but they don't explain why.

mitakas• 14 years ago

Don't read between the lines:

"The new iPhoto for iOS, however, uses Apple’s own map tiles – made from OpenStreetMap data (outside the US)."

phil2• 14 years ago

Ah, thanks -- I missed the (outside the US) bit.

karlshea• 14 years ago

One of the pingbacks on that article[1] shows that Apple's tiles have features (like lanes in a parking lot) that is only in OSM data, and that Apple is mis-rendering it.

[1] http://alastaira.wordpress.com/2012/03/08/apple-maps-aka-app...

mrinterweb• 14 years ago

I can see a big migration away from Google Maps with Google's new pricing. Google's pricing can potentially get prohibitively expensive quickly. 25000 map views per day and $4/1000 map views that exceed the free 25000 map views. I am starting a new project that is focused around mapping. There is no way Google Maps will work for me with their pricing model. Open Street Maps is great.

stevenp2• 14 years ago

We know that Apple is working on using their own map technology based on some of their acquisitions. Is it possible that OSM is just a stop-gap until their own maps are ready to go? Perhaps they didn't want to enter into another licensing agreement with Google if they're going to be ready to switch to their own solution later this year with iOS 6?

rmc22• 14 years ago

Well these are already their maps. They have styled them, hosting them etc. They are just using the raw underlying OSM data. You have to get data from somewhere, and OSM is probably one of the best sources of data.

stevenp2• 14 years ago

Interesting. Does that mean that the companies like Placebase (which Apple acquired) weren't generating their own map data? I guess I just assumed that they were, but the small amount of info I can find on them now makes it seem unclear.

Tycho• 14 years ago

Just when I thought they couldn't get any more evil.

OpenStreetMap: Welcome Apple

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