[jarofgreen]

While this is a cool project and congrats to the guy, seriously, Google can't even cover the expenses for him and other people who do this kind of thing? How many people do this kind of thing, and how much would it cost Google to cover them all? How much would it cost them to cover a salary for them too, even a basic one? Do we have any way of trying to make a reasonable guess at that? Maybe Tawanda was aware of this and is still happy to do it, but for that not even to be commented on in the article is kinda weird.

[ars]

Google normally does pay people to do this. That's how most of the streets in high tech countries were mapped.

This guy just wanted to record his home country and street view was a good way to fuse it with map data, and publish it widely.

Google didn't ask him to do this, so why would they pay him? He wanted the photos published, Google has a place to do that.

[jarofgreen]

I know Google normally do this with paid staff. But they do have a reasonably big volunteer pool too, and I think it's fair to ask about them. I've volunteered for many things before, and I know that often (as in this case, it sounds like) the volunteers do get something non-monetary out of it too. Just seemed worth commenting on, especially as the headline made such a point of how much money it was.

[michaelt]

I thought the headline was about how little money it was, not how much. I thought streetview cars were $100k+ and the article was about how the technology costs have fallen.

Obviously hearing the answer is “get a camera loaned for free” was a disappointment.

[Jyaif]

The same thing could be said about wikipedia btw: In 2018 they received 104 million dollars (of which 2.3 went to pay for the servers), so if they wanted, they could actually get 100 million worth of content.

[philipwhiuk]

This is what really annoys me about Wikipedia - it begs for money like it's going out of business but in reality the money it gets, aside from the tiny amount that actually runs everything is basically frittered in what is little more than fraud frankly.

[jarofgreen]

The difference that means I have less problems providing "free" work to Wikipedia is the open license that means others can reuse it freely. I hope Tawanda will upload all his images to one of the two open sites mentioned in this discussion as well.