arstechnica.com — We have Wikipedia and Linux, but as location-based services take off, where's the "free as in speech" street-level map of the world? OpenStreetMap has it, and 250,000 people are already contributing.The obvious question was "why bother?" Terrific maps from Google, Microsoft, and others already had a significant lead and are free...
Jun 1, 2010 View in Crawl 4
dbetaJun 1, 2010
It really isn't the drug dealers model. More like free as in beer. You can have beers while over at your friends, but if you try to drink too many or take some home you will get shamed. You can still get drunk for free, you just have to do it under the house rules.
wialniazJun 1, 2010
Nah, for standalone GPS units i got a simple tomtom, just you know, sometimes it's not enough, you have to have a clear map in front of you, for instance driving around a traffic jam and such. Thanks a lot anyways, although guys above pretty much covered all my worries up!
grahamstwJun 2, 2010
I got into OpenStreetMap recently after wondering where the MotionX GPS app on my iPhone was getting its "terrain" maps from. Turns out they use <a class="user" href="http://www.opencyclemap.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.opencyclemap.org/</a> which is an OpenStreetMap project that provides maps which emphasise useful bike stuff (cycle paths, elevation, bike shops, bike lockers, pubs).I started doing a little editing around my village and now I am completely hooked. It's pretty easy to record a forgotten track on the iPhone (or other GPS enabled device) as you walk/ride it, then import it into OSM and trace it as a new "way".
grahamstwJun 2, 2010
I have no need for Jebus, but I always map the churches anyway. They make good landmarks!