Bots are said to be harvesting OpenStreetMap data on a large scale. This costs money and endangers the project.
  • lattrommi@lemmy.mlEnglish
    13·
    1 month ago

    I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t an effort being done surreptitiously by a well-known producer of online maps, with the intent of strengthening their monopoly.

    • infeeeee@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      5·
      1 month ago

      I think it isn’t:

      • First of all Hanlon’s razor.
      • It doesn’t affect map users and rendering clients directly, as they display extracts, they don’t use the main website directly.
      • Power users also work with offline clients, e.g. I download the data, work on it offline, then upload it, so what I notice from this is sometimes the download or upload times out, but I just retry it and it works after a while. It’s annoying, but not a big deal from my point of view.
      • I think it mostly affects casual mappers, who add a lot of very important data, but by volume it’s much smaller than the data contributed by the big mappers. There was a very good presentation about this in 2014: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/SotM_2014_session:_The_Long_Tail_of_OpenStreetMap
      • It affects mostly sysadmins, who will burn out.