The OSM community some time ago adopted the ODbL license, which (roughly speaking) has two major requirements for users of our data:

1. To contribute their own data back to OSM (the “share alike” clause)
2. To include attribution on products built from our data

It’s almost certain that most mappers — especially those contributing regularly — have encountered a map on the web or in printed form based on OSM data that violated the attribution requirement in some way. The attribution text might have been shuffled out of the way, credit for our work given to somebody else, or the attribution was absent completely. By my estimate, around 10% of websites that use OpenStreetMap tiles lack proper attribution. This is in addition to an unknown proportion of maps with similar problems published on physical media (especially info panels installed outdoors), or ones using custom tiles not made by OSM. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that proper attribution is missing on widely-used map products published by large companies with hundreds of thousands to millions of users.

The OSM project celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, and one would expect that should be enough time to develop effective mechanisms for addressing license violations. This obviously is not the case. We as a community delegated the right to enforce the license to the OSM Foundation, but enforcement is something this institution has yet to demonstrate. All the OSMF has accomplished in this regard is to publish a “love letter” which individual volunteers are supposed to use, containing language that asks violators to fix the attribution problem. There is no follow-up procedure in place for situations when the violator fails to respond in the desired way. We also have no mechanism that actively looks for violations, relying instead on volunteers to report cases to one of a number of case-tracking lists that mappers created over time.

… See full entry

tl; dr:

Firms like Apple, Facebook and Amazon are paying (their own) mappers for OpenStreetMap (OSM) edits. You are an OSM editor making the same type of work the paid editors are. Shouldn’t you be paid for your edits too? Let’s start sending these firms a collective invoice for our work and use the received funds to benefit the OSM ecosystem. There is an easy way to join if you use JOSM, but users of other map editors can participate as well.

The problem

The OSM project is governed by a license that allows its geo data to be freely used by anybody, including the most wealthy global corporations. Regardless, firms like Apple, Facebook or Amazon are paying for improving the OSM data. They do so mainly by hiring mappers, but also by directly sending money to the OSM foundation, albeit with grants that seem rather small in comparison to market capitalization of these firms. These developments - while good for improving the OSM data, raise also some issues. One concerns fairness: if the firms pay their employees/contractors for map edits, shouldn’t they pay to all who make the same kinds of edits? After all, the edits they provide are not special in any respect - volunteer editors have been supplying such data to the OSM database for years. A more subtle issue is, that emergence of paid map editors dramatically changes character of the project, which for most of its existence has been a purely volunteer affair. Increasingly, volunteer mappers can no longer point to “the Map” and say - we, volunteers did this. Others raised this issue as a problem, but no way out of it has been suggested so far.

The solution

… See full entry