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> How do you think an alternative to duopolistic apps valued hundreds of billions could emerge without funding ? Government or non-governmental public bodies. Or new legal / administrative entities that are not driven by profit; we are not, as a matter of fact, tied to a binary choice situation whereby private businesses are the better option for such a crucial service. > Isn't open-source software the closer model to what you desire ? It can (and it should) definitely be open source, I concur. But that's not necessarily an ownership and control discussion, even less so when we're taking into consideration the infrastructure required for such a project. Genuine public ownership / control assumes giving the leverages (decision-making, governance, choices, infrastructure, model etc.) to the public itself in one form or another. It can be done via a government, but there are reasons to suspect that governments will eventually abuse it or under-fund it, like they often eventually have done; however, that is still a better option than private ownership and control. > A "public" map app in the sense of "developed and hosted by the government" could enable large funding, but could also be quite frightening. I disagree. If it's a dictatorship, then private ownership and governance are already not very credible or private. If it's a real democracy, then the public should be able to exert control over it via its institutions and democratic processes. That said, I also prefer a model where the government doesn't own such a platform and dictate how it's developed and used. In a hierarchy of ownership and governance models from worst to best, private is likely the worst (Google, Apple & the like), followed by governments, and genuine public ownership where citizens themselves can decide how it operates and evolves. The question of money is also partially real: private companies themselves don't create money out of thin air, they rely on public infrastructure (from currency, to legislation/operating rules, to the economy) to operate and need paying consumers that have money, especially a b2c company like this one. In other words, the money is already there, it's just out of reach. |
In France, where cartes.app is built and incorporated, the government is far from being ideologically equipped to envision the launch a (privacy-focused) general public map application. IGN provides map, but they are still far from a general public usage, they're more useful for experts.
Even the professional office suite dedicated to agents (LaSuite) is in risk because it's said to destroy French companies (trying to) deliver these tools.
Meanwhile, a private company, if necessary with capped profits and salaries, seems by far the most practical solution in my experience. Hence the choice.