Always sad when a big company kills an idea, but it happens a lot.
For me the really sad thing about this is thinking about all that community collected data. If a company manages to attract a community of people volunteering and contributing data, it's wrong for that to be taken away. Hopefully it won't be taken away completely in this case, but if the app is phased out, then you'll just have to hope your data shows up within google maps in some form. You're at their mercy. The data was collected by the community but it never belonged to the community.
There's a broad principle here which I think we need to be more collectively savvy about. Community "Crowd sourcing" should always go hand-in hand with community ownership of the data. This means open licensing and offering of bulk downloads. There needs to be increased awareness, and strong campaigns against the behaviour of companies who recruit a volunteer community, but don't give the data back (and I mean give it back properly, in a raw unencumbered open-licensed form)
Waze is not the worst example of this because I think a lot of waze contribution is in the form of very passive data collection. The value comes from algorithms rather than dedicated passionate contribution from volunteers. But even so. The community puts data in. The community loses the data in the end.
For me the really sad thing about this is thinking about all that community collected data. If a company manages to attract a community of people volunteering and contributing data, it's wrong for that to be taken away. Hopefully it won't be taken away completely in this case, but if the app is phased out, then you'll just have to hope your data shows up within google maps in some form. You're at their mercy. The data was collected by the community but it never belonged to the community.
There's a broad principle here which I think we need to be more collectively savvy about. Community "Crowd sourcing" should always go hand-in hand with community ownership of the data. This means open licensing and offering of bulk downloads. There needs to be increased awareness, and strong campaigns against the behaviour of companies who recruit a volunteer community, but don't give the data back (and I mean give it back properly, in a raw unencumbered open-licensed form)
Waze is not the worst example of this because I think a lot of waze contribution is in the form of very passive data collection. The value comes from algorithms rather than dedicated passionate contribution from volunteers. But even so. The community puts data in. The community loses the data in the end.