Africangeogeek, spatial geekery in Africa

Well, Google did take us through google map maker, and i though wow, the tool is very nice. I were to work for google as a geo-officer, i would be happier since work has been made easier. I recently say a facebook status update by a geo friend of mine, (Jubal , this is you), and brought out the issue of licensing the Google Map Maker data. Well as usual with facebook, update, i did not bother much, until when a sleep, something just hit me. Google Maps has terms and conditions. I realized that Google Maps actually has licensing, and the license costs around 80,000KSH. Then the thing came to my mind, how come as a user of map maker, i am not entitled to any of that 80,000/=, the best way to go about this is to remove the licensing, make tha data open source. If this licesnsing model conticnues, i might just quit using it.

During the Earth outreach programme, this Tuesday, i happen to meet with one of my fomer univeristy lecturers. He told me, the Googlers encouraged them to use map maker for one of their projects. Which is mapping schools access to ICT facilities. I brought it to his attention that once they publish that information on map maker, it is pushed to Google Maps and later on to Google Earth. So what does this exactly mean. It means, for people who get funded to undertake certain projects, map maker is not the way to go. How can the donors certify that it is actually your work to do the mapping and not Google who did the mapping?. As a donor the last thing i would like to see is the data you collected being freely handled by Google ,and Google earning some revenue from it. The best way i think for the lecturer is to use their data as a KML overlay. The other fact, is why not enable mappers license the data they contribute? It can be free or for a price? In this case, i could go to my home town of Meru, Map the whole of it and earn some revenue from this. The other option is just to make all the mapping libraries open source regardless of log ins and stuff.

Well whats your say?

This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.