On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 1:13 AM, andrzej zaborowski <balr...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 17 April 2011 01:53, David Murn <da...@incanberra.com.au> wrote: >> On Sat, 2011-04-16 at 23:36 +0100, 80n wrote: >>> Do you think that Google haven't considered the possibilty of >>> incorporating OSM data into their MapMaker database? Why do you think >>> they haven't? Perhaps our data is not good enough for them? Or >>> perhaps, legally, they don't think they have the right? >> >> I think the 'not good' enough argument pretty much hits the nail on the >> head. As great as our data may be, any commercial entity probably has >> access to similar data, which they can probably get with some sort of >> quality assurance guarantee. If google wants maps of a city/town/state, >> they just goto the government of the area and get it. They know its >> complete, they know its accurate, they know if theres a problem with the >> data that theres only one source to contact. > > That's not true everywhere, for example all of the places where google > enabled Map Maker.
I'm not sure that it's true anywhere. What government provides no-cost data which is useful for routing? I think the best explanation for why Google hasn't blatantly and openly (*) assimilated all of OSM's data, is that they aren't sure they can do so legally. Sure, OSM is incomplete and contains errors, but lots of the public domain government data that Google has assimilated is incomplete and contains errors. (*) I'm not sure they aren't using OSM to extent some extent, such as to find possible errors to flag for manual review, without publicizing it. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
