[Bqhatevwr]

I think one can appeal to the morals and desire to be good/useful with a community mapper, but one cannot with a corporation, especially a publicly traded one.

If Facebook decides that the metadata format/style for a particular field should be X because otherwise they'd have to spend $______ of engineering resources on reworking their mobile app and fuck the OSM community which has decided it should be Y, for completely valid reasons that were debated and decided upon by the community....and then all of their hundreds of 10-cents-an-hour drones start submitting changes with the new style...the community is screwed. Especially if it accepts money from Facebook, because there's a power imbalance no matter how much paperwork you have saying "thou shalt not get anything from thy donation."

If you want a great example of how corporate involvement corrupts - look at Firefox, which has been caught not only with its hand in the Collecting User Data cookie jar, but inserted software for the makers of a TV show (Mr. Robot) and software nobody asked for, with no way to disable it (Paper, I think it was/is called?)

Not only did they get caught with their hand in the Collecting User Data cookie jar, but when someone brought it to the public's attention via the bugtracker, the bug was locked almost immediately by a mozilla employee. Then that was reversed. Then the project manager for said project who had previously worked at a data analytics company re-classified the bug as secret/internal-only, and it quietly all disappeared under the rug.

[juliansimioni]

For sure, that's a legitimate concern if/when there's one major corporate contributor that doesn't have to play along with everyone else.

Part of what makes the current OSM situation work is that nobody is bigger than everyone else. If Facebook wants to do their own thing, they're going to be going against Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and the rest of the community.

We've seen from both the world of capitalism in general and definitely the software world that consolidation eventually happens, so maybe this situation is inherently unstable and doomed to fail. But IMO the OSM community should work to make it last as long as possible.