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Has anyone used or contributed to OpenStreetMap?
(coeus.sbs)
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I have done 14k edits over six years. I too like it for being therapeutic. I'd rather do micro-edita on osm than play another level of candy crush. Same kind of reward but you are also helping out creating something larger!
Honestly though, I don't think osm will ever catch up to the commercial alternatives. Mostly because their harsh stance against automatic edits (and lack of version control). Also the lack of standardization is a problem. It's very hard to create client applications because the data is structured way different in different regions.
I don’t think the aim is necessarily to compete against commercial alternatives but rather to have a backstop/fallback if/when they fail.
Also don’t forget LOTS of commercial providers use OSM data for their mapping. So eventually a lot of the data does make it into people’s hands.