Note:  This is the first of two posts, both coming out of the recent discussion about whether OpenStreetMap should eliminate the Share Alike clause in the license. Alex Barth started all that with his post. I won’t re-hash Alex’s argument but you can (and should) read it. 

Management guru Peter Drucker observed that most of life’s arguments result from the inability of the parties concerned to agree on what exactly they were arguing about. I find that that wisdom holds pretty consistently, and is certainly applicable to the comments and arguments spawned by Alex Barth’s post on the need for OpenStreetMap to drop the Share Alike clause of the contract.

The OSM community is roughly divided into two groups. They are:

1. Those that believe that the important thing about OSM is the act of creating the map.  The community that comes together to build an open source product that can be shared and built further by that community.  They favor hand-entered data, distrust corporate motives regarding, value community involvement and consider beer drinking an essential ingredient of map-making. I’ll call this group The Artists.
2. Those that believe that the important thing about OSM is getting the map done. The process of getting that map done is less important than the act of completion; of getting to a usable, open-source map that is free to use and free of byzantine license restrictions associated with commercial maps. They like bulk data imports, especially if they can drink beer while the data is uploading. I’ll call this group The Merchants.

Much of the raging that goes on inside the OSM community is between these groups, always at odds because they fundamentally don’t agree on The Important Thing about OSM. The comments from one side sail harmlessly past the other without any impact and certainly no changing of minds. At least they can agree on the beer.

One group isn’t right and the other wrong. After all, there’s no authority within OSM to make that sort of statement.  They just are, and from what I can tell will continue to be. None of that impacts Alex’s argument, but it helps to categorize the responses. For the record, I am in the Merchant camp and the following comes from that perspective.  If you are an Artist, my rationale won’t make sense.

There is actually a third group: Those that couldn’t care less.  They signed up and contributed because it sounded fun, but really have no opinion.  I don’t know what percentage of OSM users this represents but if you estimate it by the number of members that don’t vote for OSMF directors, I’d say it is the biggest group of the three.

Author’s note:  I have been an OSM member since 2006, although my contributions are spasmodic and a bit of a random walk. I have worked with two organizations that have worked on commercial applications of OSM (Cloudmade and MapBox) and have talked to just about every major internet player interested in mapping about their opinions of the project.  I  subscribe to the legal-talk forum because I believe that self-flagellation is purifying for the soul. 

News out of Nokia yesterday was that HERE CEO, Michael Halbherr would be leaving to pursue “entrepreneurial activities”.  It is sad that the official press release is usually the least credible.  A more likely explanation is that Halbherr left due to disagreement with new Nokia chief Rajeev Suri over the direction of HERE. Specifically, it sounds like Michael wanted to push HERE into new consumer markets while Suri wanted to retrench and focus on traditional NAVTEQ markets, especially automotive.

Given HERE’s lack of profitability and the uncertainty of a consumer market dominated by Google Maps, Suri’s position sounds reasonable. HERE can focus on what they know, sell to a market they dominate and differentiate by pushing into high accuracy maps that will be needed for ADAS and self-driving cars. The other path involves competing with a mapping behemoth with amazing capabilities and the rather unpleasant habit of giving all the resulting maps away for free. Good move, right?

Wrong. If that’s the plan, Nokia is driving into a dead end alley.  When they get to the high accuracy automotive mapping nirvana they hope will save them, they’ll find that Google is already there with better data and a better business model.  What do you think all those StreetView cars are collecting? They won’t have the business model to compete there.  Their automotive customers are slowly bowing to the inevitable loss of control of the driver experience and HERE will see customers move away and margins drop.  And they won’t be able to move anywhere else. Open mapping sources will have taken the consumer business and be closing the gap in auto as well.

HERE will look better in the short term (focus, profits) but will die in the longer term. The least they could do is to change the name back to NAVTEQ 2.0 so we don’t have to call it by the awful HERE name.

Maps aren’t just about accurate descriptions of physical space. Not anymore. Maps are just a template for displaying data and increasingly for collecting information about those places and how people move through them. I thought that was where HERE was going with recent acquisitions of Medio and Desti. Their reach though Yahoo!, Amazon, Microsoft and others gives them hundreds of millions of users with data to feed that engine.