started open source maps story

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+One of the great bright lights of open source software and community projects on the internet is OpenStreetMap, which offers an open source mapping platform similar to, but also very philosophically different than, Google Maps. 
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+In my experience OpenStreetMap is every bit as accurate as Google Maps and quite frequently surpasses it, particularly outside the United States. One place that Google Maps has always had OpenStreetMap beat though is Google Street View, for which, until recently, there was no OSM equivalent.
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+Now Telenav, one of OSM's major supporters, has launched a new project dubbed OpenStreetView with the goal of crowdsourcing street-level photography for OpenStreetMap across the globe. To be clear, OpenStreetView is not at this time a project directly supported by OSM. Also, not all of the components in the OpenStreetView toolkit are open source, though in the comments on the project's announcement earlier this year developers say that the reason some bits are not open source has to do with component licensing issues and is apparently a known issue that's being worked on.
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+In the mean time, if you're okay with a little bit of closed source code running on your Android phone you can contribute imagery to OpenStreetView, which will publish it under a creative commons CC-BY-SA license. You can also quickly and easily delete your contributions should you change your mind. 
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+The new OpenStreetView project provides the software to create, upload and host your own street view imagery. Rather than expensive, high tech-outfitted cars, OpenStreetView uses Android phones fitted with a Bluetooth LE (or wifi) dongle. At the moment only the Veepeak Mini WiFi OBD2 dongle is supported, but increasing <a href="https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetView/OBD2">hardware compatibility</a> is a top priority for the nascent project. It's also possible to contribute using a GoPro or similar camera using OSV's uploading tools, though at this stage those tools are basically just a python script.
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+The current apps and hardware can be a little fiddly to setup and get working. It's not quite at the ready for a general audience to participate stage, but if you have any experience with mapping software or contribute to OSM already, there's nothing to complicated about it. Suffice to say that mapping nerds can get up and running in a couple of hours. 
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+If all of this is giving you a sense of deja vu, that's probably because there's another crowd sourced "street view" project for OSM out there by the name of Mapillary.
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+There's some related good news for less map-savvy users who would like to contribute as well with the GNOME project's Maps application recently adding support for editing and contributing to OSM.
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+One frequently lobbed criticism of open source projects is that they're "just copying" proprietary efforts along the same lines. Some times this is true, though rarely is it entirely true. To pick one frequently cited example, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, better known as GIMP, did arrive many years after Adobe Photoshop first appeared on the scene. However, features many users think of a starting in Photoshop and being copied by GIMP in fact came from GIMP, for example, content-aware fill was a GIMP plugin long before it became part of Photoshop.
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+Still there is some truth to the idea that proprietary software is better at probing markets to figure out what works and what doesn't. The fact is proprietary software generally has more capital behind it. However, at the same time, open source can often do things proprietary software can't, like ship experimental ideas such as content-aware fill long before their proprietary counterparts.
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 I also found a new "developer" web browser based on Chrome/Chromium that has some nice features like phone emulation, synchronized simultaneous mobile and desktop views, auto refresh and a ton of nice testing features. It's a bit like Firefox developer edition, but based on Chrome so it's fast. I thought it would be worth a quick look, say 800 words.
 
-And finally, Openstreetmap released Openstreetmap view, which is a community-powered version of google street view. You can record tracks with GPD and video and upload them to openstreetmap. : https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/mvexel/diary/39274 Pretty cool alternative to Google Street View, I could get you 800 words on this pretty quick.
 
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