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by poisonborz 334 days ago
The base premise was already bent: sell access to community-uploaded material. I know Google Maps does this on a much grander scale but at least the data is more or less accessible for everyone.

I wonder why there aren't popular free/open projects that do what Komoot does. What they did above the contributions seem to be doable by a dedicated group or a nonprofit.
3 comments
jona-f 334 days ago
There is openstreetmaps of course and osmand as a navigation app. There is also a biking specific project related to openstreetmaps. None of it is as polished as komoot of course. Far from it. This sell-out was totally predictable. Why the outrage? Do people never learn? It's so frustrating.
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Guvante 334 days ago
I think it is fair to be annoyed that crowd sourcing is used to enrich a select few.

Honestly the best course of action is to let it die. $300M is enough money that losing the user base would be enough for similar things to stop happening.

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andrewshadura 334 days ago
I’ve been using https://cycle.travel for a similar purpose. I may not be quite as polished, but it does its job, and it’s developed by a person from the OpenStreetMap community.
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Doctor_Fegg 334 days ago
*waves

(I've just commissioned a designer for a bit of a refresh, so it should get a _little_ more polished soon!)

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NoboruWataya 334 days ago
> I wonder why there aren't popular free/open projects that do what Komoot does. What they did above the contributions seem to be doable by a dedicated group or a nonprofit.

Well, there are still costs involved (not just financial but also labour), and someone has to pay them. We are lucky to have a number of great open source and community-driven projects where people do contribute time and money to make data freely available to everyone, but it's not guaranteed. If there aren't enough people who are willing and able to contribute, or the costs get too great, the project will founder.

OpenStreetMap seems like it is already doing this to an extent, or at least is a good platform on which something like this could be built. Hopefully this saga encourages more people to contribute that way.

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