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by uneekname·3y ago·view on hn ↗
Microsoft has historically been a fairly good ally to the OpenStreetMap community. We use Bing imagery a lot in our mapping efforts, as well as their buildings dataset, just to name two examples.

I hope that Microsoft owns up to this mistake, and pivots back to supporting our community rather than fracturing it. As the article notes, the OSM community is very sensitive about how large corporations communicate with us as they contribute.

2 comments
That's what I'm hoping as well. I specifically wrote this essay with the hope that this will be corrected.

And I don't think that big, corporate involvement is necessarily evil - but we should hold them to a higher standard and be critical of them in due time.

yeah but in a strange twist, the Meta Overture project appears to have hired this guy as a major architect (corrections welcome)

https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/