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OpenStreetMap (OSM) est maintenant au centre d’une alliance contre nature des plus grandes et des plus riches entreprises technologiques au monde. Les sociétés les plus importantes au monde considèrent OSM comme une infrastructure critique pour certains des logiciels les plus utilisés jamais écrits. Les quatre sociétés du cercle restreint, Facebook, Apple, Amazon et Microsoft, se retrouvent maintenant à investir et à collaborer avec OSM à une échelle sans précédent.
The first time I spoke with Jennings Anderson, I couldn’t believe what he was telling me. I mean that genuinely — I did not believe him. He was a little incredulous about it himself. I felt like he was sharing an important secret with me that the world didn’t yet know.
If I write it here, I probably wrote it first on Twitter.
The open secret Jennings filled me in on is that OpenStreetMap (OSM) is now at the center of an unholy alliance of the world’s largest and wealthiest technology companies. The most valuable companies in the world are treating OSM as critical infrastructure for some of the most-used software ever written.
The four companies in the inner circle— Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft— have a combined market capitalization of over six trillion dollars.¹ In almost every other setting, they are mortal enemies fighting expensive digital wars of attrition. Yet they now find themselves eagerly investing in and collaborating on OSM at an unprecedented scale (more on the scale later).
What likely started as a conversation in a British pub between grad students in 2004 has spiraled out of control into an invaluable, strategic, voluntarily-maintained data asset the wealthiest companies in the world can’t afford to replicate.
For the Uninitiated: What is OpenStreetMap?
I will admit that I used to think of OSM as little more than a virtuous hobby for over-educated Europeans living abroad — a cutesy internet collectivist experiment somewhere on the spectrum between eBird and Linux. It’s most commonly summarized with a variant of this analogy:
OSM is to an atlas as Wikipedia is to an encyclopedia.
OSM acolytes hate this comparison in the much same way baseball players resent when people describe the sport as “cricket for fat people.” While vaguely truthful, it doesn’t quite get to the spirit of the thing.
OSM is incomparable. Over 1.5M individuals have contributed data to it. It averages 4.5M changes per day.
You can think of OSM in several ways:
- A distributed community of mappers contributing information about the geography of the world to a common repository
- A free web map hosted at https://www.openstreetmap.org/
- A loosely affiliated collection of free and open source tools for mapping the world
- A real-time stream of instructions representing how to add, change, or remove cartographically projected geometries and associated metadata based on a prior state
- …Google Maps, but openly licensed
It’s hard to get people to agree on what exactly OSM is, but almost everyone agrees on one thing: it’s extraordinarily valuable and important.
What Jennings Told Me about OSM
For those paying attention, none of what I outline below will be news. However — outside of a relatively small cluster of weirdos who pay attention to trends in geospatial technology— almost no one seems to be paying attention.
That’s mostly because so few people have even heard of OpenStreetMap, despite the fact that hundreds of millions of people rely on it during any given month. If you’ve ever opened Snap Maps or Apple Maps or Bing Maps or even just peeked at the dash of your obnoxious neighbor’s new Tesla…you’ve used OSM.
In May of 2019, Jennings co-authored a paper with Dipto Sarkar and Leysia Palen titled, Corporate Editors in the Evolving Landscape of OpenStreetMap. If you prefer the research in presentation form, this talk is a fabulous summary of their findings:
Dr. Anderson’s talk at State of the Map 2019, “Corporate Editors in the Evolving Landscape of OpenStreetMap: A Close Investigation of the Impact to the Map & Community.”
In that talk, Jennings outlines the findings presented in his research. Not only was there already significant corporate investment happening in OSM in 2018, but in many cases corporate editors were responsible for the majority of edits in the specific geographies they were focused on. For instance:
For areas where corporate teams are active, on average, the non-corporate editors are now responsible for less than 25% of total road editing activity, which is down from closer to 70% in 2017.
Jennings noted, importantly, that as of 2018 non-corporate editors were still responsible for the majority of activity on OSM (about 70% of all edits) and were significantly more active on edits to buildings, places of interest, and amenities.
In a more recent talk from State of the Map in July 2020, Jennings presented updated figures showing that the torrent of corporate contributions only increased from 2018 to 2019 and beyond with Amazon and Apple trending along the steepest slope.
Seriously, watch the entire talk, it’s amazing: Curious Cases of Corporations in OpenStreetMap
Also interesting to note is Mapbox’s apparent decision to stop investing significantly into direct OSM edits and contributions. Apple was responsible for more edits in 2019 than Mapbox accounted for in its entire corporate history…I don’t have a good explanation for that. I wonder if they decided their effort could be more highly leveraged on core web mapping technology rather than manual digitization.
The Clash of Cultures Happening in OSM
I’m in no position to comment on most of the things I write about. But in this instance, I’m particularly unqualified — OSM has amassed a long-lived, fantastically diverse, and inherently fragmented community. I’ve never even commented in one of the forums.
But one thing that is clear even to a casual observer like me: one of the consequences of increased corporate involvement in OSM is a significant backlash from members within the OSM community that feel the community (and data) is being irreversibly adulterated by these profiteering intruders.
At the last OSM annual conference Frederik Ramm, a prominent and quite thoughtful OSM community member, summarized the attitude toward corporate contributors this way:
“[…] none of these companies is essential to OpenStreetMap. They are contributors, but OpenStreetMap could work perfectly well without them […] the mainstay of OpenStreetMap is the millions of hobbyists, individuals that contribute to OpenStreetMap.
A vocal minority of voluntary contributors to OSM seem to have a bit of a chip on their shoulder when it comes to the suits. A consistent undercurrent that I’ve noticed is skepticism about the motivations and incentives of for-profit firms. Here’s a typical sentiment excerpted from Serge Wroclawski’s magnificently controversial blog post, Why OpenStreetMap is in Serious Trouble (published in February of 2018).
Many of the founders of the project, as well as others, have launched commercial services around OSM. Unfortunately, this creates an incentive to keep the project small and limited in scope to map up the gap with commercial services which they can sell.
I think the playing field has changed significantly since Serge wrote those words — he was likely referring to projects like CloudMade (now defunct) and Mapbox ,which sought to offer generic map services on top of OSM’s dynamic map database (rather than enhance in-house products where mapping is ancillary to their core value proposition like it is for FAAM). He makes an interesting argument that OSM itself should be offering these services rather than letting companies piggyback on the efforts of countless volunteers while capturing all of the economic value.
What’s Motivating These Companies?
I wrote earlier this year about the concept of “Commoditizing Your Complement,” in my explanation of why Facebook acquired Mapillary and then gave away all the data they had just purchased for free.
The concept is simple: undermine your competitors’ intellectual property advantage by collaborating with aligned entities to cheapen it with a free and openly licensed alternative.
I would wager that corporate participation in OSM is less about directly monetizing souped-up versions of OSM data provided as modern web services and more about desperately avoiding the existential conflict of having to pay Google for the privilege of accessing their proprietary map data.⁵
Whatever the motivations of these mega-corporations, they’ve succeeded in carving out a niche for themselves within the OSM community whether the hobbyists like it or not. I’d like to highlight a nuance often lost in this discussion — just exactly who are these companies hiring to add data to the map? They are often already-active, enthusiastic contributors to OSM. These are people living the open data fanatic’s dream: getting paid to do a job they find so fulfilling they would otherwise do it for free in their spare time.
There’s obviously a lot more to it than just sticking it to Google. Facebook, for instance, has ambitions of building new types of digital experiences that interplay with the real world (as evidenced by their focus on augmented reality and acquisition of novel user interface technology like CTRL-labs). Apple has added LiDAR to its new line of iPhones and iPods allowing customers to scan the 3D world in high fidelity among other exciting uses:
These firms have outgrown your office and your living room. They want to be with you literally every where you go, and constantly seduce you with entertaining and immersive experiences. The more of your attention they can monopolize, the more money they can make from selling chunks of it to advertisers and people developing software on their platforms.
Whether you like their motivations or not, the result is a desire to map the world in higher fidelity and at larger scale than even they can afford to accomplish independently. And that has, for better or worse, brought their interests into alignment with the grassroots OSM community.
Why Does it Matter?
Well, anytime the wealthiest institutions in history are quietly collaborating on something, I think it’s worth noting. I’m not sure there is a precedent for such a collaboration — if you know of a case where otherwise embittered mega-corporations worked with a global community of volunteers on a public dataset…let me know. I’d love to learn about it.
The question on my mind is how idiosyncratic this situation really is. Does OSM represent a model for strategic corporate sponsorship of public goods moving forward? Or is it tragically inimitable?
For instance: I work for a company called Azavea that, among many noble efforts, maintains Cicero. It’s a database of elected officials and legislative districts in several countries around the world that gets updated daily. You can imagine that this should be a public good — like, doesn’t the government already have this information? Turns out…nah. Cicero requires ceaseless, grueling work to keep updated, and that means serious investment of time and money.
One of the key differences between Cicero and OSM is a community of contributors. Community is what makes OSM special. Without it, the project is “default dead,” as they say in Silicon Valley. Much like elected official information, map data goes stale fairly quickly and therefore requires constant life support.
OSM’s community seems conflicted about whether or not corporate participation is ok (let alone good) for the future of the project. And yet the community is precisely what attracts corporate contributors. OSM provides two advantages over just buying privately collected data:
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Existing data is free and growing apace
- Proprietary data contributed to OSM may be expanded upon and/or maintained at no additional expense by the community
Some may squirm at the idea that their contributions to OSM help FAAM…after all, do they really need the help? But what’s beautiful is that FAAM is contributing (rather than passively mooching) because of the compounding value of having any/all data make it into the community’s growing number of hands.
I’m kind of shocked to be saying it, but somehow — almost inexplicably — the goals of the OSM community and corporate contributors seem to be largely aligned. They all want an accurate, ubiquitous map of the world that can be maintained in perpetuity as sustainably as possible.
It’s the opposite of the Tragedy of the Commons — all of the private property holders, acting in their own self interest, are enriching the common resource rather than depleting it.contributors account for ~90% of the edits to OSM. This roughly adheres to something called the 1% rule of online communities which states that, “1% of Internet users are responsible for creating content, while 99% are merely consumers of that content.”
Written by Joe Morrison
Le groupe chinois vient de perdre la dérogation à l'embargo américain qui lui permettait de maintenir à jour ses smartphones sous Android. Les anciens modèles ne devraient pas devenir obsolètes pour autant.
horizon s'assombrit pour les smartphones Huawei. Les États-Unis ont décidé d'accentuer encore un peu plus la pression sur le groupe technologique chinois. L'administration de Donald Trump n'a pas renouvelé la licence temporaire qu'elle accordait tous les trimestres à la firme de Shenzhen pour lui permettre de maintenir certains échanges avec des entreprises américaines depuis que le département américain du Commerce l'a placée sur une liste noire le 16 mai 2019 sur fond de guerre commerciale avec la Chine, selon le Washington Post.
À travers ces sursis, Washington souhaitait permettre aux entreprises technologiques américaines et aux opérateurs de télécommunications locaux de trouver des alternatives aux deals conclus avec Huawei, très implanté dans le secteur des télécoms outre-Atlantique. Ces accords permettaient notamment à Google de continuer à délivrer des mises à jour et des correctifs Android aux smartphones lancés par Huawei avant la mise en place de l'embargo. Contrairement aux appareils lancés après l'entrée en vigueur des sanctions, les anciens modèles pouvaient continuer à utiliser le magasin d'applications Play Store et les Google Mobile Services, les applications Google les plus populaires (Chrome, Gmail, Maps, Search, etc.), la pierre angulaire de l'expérience Android.
Depuis le 13 août, date de l'expiration de la dernière licence générale temporaire d'exploitation, Google ne peut plus collaborer avec Huawei. Les contours des conséquences de cette décision sont encore flous. En théorie, Google n'est désormais plus autorisé à fournir des mises à jour pour les appareils Huawei. Cela signifie que les anciens modèles de la marque et ceux de sa filiale Honor pourraient ne pas être mis à jour vers Android 11 dans les prochaines semaines. Des modèles comme le P20, le P30, le Mate 20 ou le Honor 10 pourraient cesser de recevoir les patchs de sécurité et les mises à jour pour les applications installées, avec le risque de devenir obsolètes.
Huawei continuera à proposer des mises à jour, mais...
En pratique, on ignore encore pour l'instant dans quelle mesure l'expiration de la licence générale temporaire impactera les futures mises à jour logicielles des smartphones des clients de la marque chinoise. Google a confirmé auprès du Washington Post que c'est bien cette licence qui lui permettait de collaborer avec Huawei et de prendre en charge les appareils lancés avant les sanctions américaines. Contacté par RTL.fr, un porte-parole de Huawei assure que les smartphones qui disposent déjà des applications Google continueront de les avoir et que des mises à jour vers la partie open source d'Android seront toujours déployées.
Huawei est en effet autorisé à utiliser la partie ouverte d'Android. Cette version accessible à tous les constructeurs n'est pas concernée par les restrictions américaine. Elle propose l'essentiel de l'expérience Android mais ne dispose pas des services Google et du magasin d'applications Play Store. C'est la version qui est déjà utilisée par Huawei pour ses smartphones lancés après la mise en place des sanctions, le Mate 30 et le P40. Sur ces modèles, on retrouve des mises à jour Android développées par Huawei via le système EMUI et des services alternatifs comme l'AppGallery, le magasin d'application de la marque (qui compte environ 60.000 références, une broutille par rapport au Play Store) et des applications maison, censées répondre aux mêmes besoins numériques que les applications Google, qui souffrent encore de la comparaison avec leurs concurrentes.
Huawei devrait logiquement s'appuyer sur ses équipes internes et sur la communauté open source pour continuer à proposer des mises à jour logicielles et de sécurité à ses clients. Ces dernières ne seront plus déployées directement par Google. Cela devrait rallonger de plusieurs semaines le délai de leur distribution. Avec un risque de voir des failles de sécurité exploitées par des cybercriminels dans cet intervalle, souligne le site technologique du quotidien belge Le Soir. Autre enjeu pour Huawei, réussir à maintenir à flot les services de Google et les applications les plus populaires du Play Store (Facebook, Instagram, Uber, etc.), sans l'aide de Google et des éditeurs américains de ces services, sous peine de les voir devenir peu à peu obsolètes, au fil des changements apportés dans leurs codes.
Between 1998 and 2003, searching for something on Google was magical. I remember inputting a vague notion like "oil mother's milk," and being directed to an interview with Thomas Gold, an astrophysicist who postulated that hydrocarbon deposits refilled themselves because of geological pressure.
Today, if you're looking for something that is technical, specific, academic or generally non-commercial, good frigging luck. The world's best information retrieval system has devolved into something reminiscent of 2006-era Digg: A popularity index that's controlled by a small number of commercially motivated players. They call themselves "SEOs."
Technical search-engine optimization specialists get a pass: They generally make the web faster, safer and more accessible. "Black hat" SEOs are obvious villains. They boost their own web rankings by breaking the law (e.g. hacking into a website to add links back to their own). But, black hats are the petty criminals of the SEO world. It's the "white hat" SEOs, the supposed good guys, who are the wolves in sheep's clothing.
These web marketers have a simple strategy: to squelch competition by concentrating authority. They march behind a banner of legitimacy and self righteousness, and like a totalitarian regime, they believe their end justifies their means. Here are some of the tactics they use:
Rewriting history
If you've ever re-read an article and sworn that the headline, hyperlinks and headings were modified, you're not imagining it. SEO specialists "optimize" old articles to make them more marketable (and to drive visitors into newer, more commercial content). When I look back at articles that I wrote a decade ago, they've been updated with text that I didn't write, carrying meanings that I didn't mean.
Erasing the past
"Content pruning" is an effective SEO tactic on large, established websites. Rather that archiving old content with historical significance, many websites will delete it from their servers and return a 410 status code. Gone. The goal is to optimize "crawl budget," keeping Google focused on the content that matters now. The result is a web without institutional memory or accountability.
Directing the narrative
Show me a modern newsroom and I'll show you a content strategist whom writers are expected to consult. But, when journalists feel pressured to write about topics they are not comfortable with, or, when they are compelled to phrase things in a specific way, "SEO best practices" start to look like propaganda. This is the cable news effect, where a behind-the-scenes strategist is editing the script and pushing every trend as "Breaking News!"
Providing the illusion of choice
A handful of publishing companies own hundreds media websites that collectively receive billions of search engine visits each year. Search for "best smartphone" and you may see results from websites like TechRadar, Android Central, T3, Tom's Guide, Anandtech, iMore or Top Ten Reviews. It doesn't matter which site you vote for with your click, the ballot is stacked: All of those websites are owned by a single company.
Hoarding wealth
Links are the currency of the web. Without them, search engines couldn't judge the relative worth of one page versus another. Unfortunately, many large websites hoard their link equity by refusing to link to external websites, or, by using a rel="nofollow" attribute on every external link (i.e. telling search engines to ignore those links). This makes the entire web poorer as a result.
SEO is a zero-sum game that has a loser for every winner. But, we all lose when SEO promotes gaslighting, link rot, conformity, monopoly and subversion. I remember when it was easy to find logic, facts, and reason on the web. Then, someone optimized it.
Les relations entre les USA et la Chine vont et viennent au gré des semaines et alors que l'on pensait les négociations au beau fixe avec une levée prochaine de l'embargo visant Huawei, voilà que les USA évoquent de nouvelles sanctions, encore plus lourdes.
Les efforts de Huawei pour se détacher de Google de façon définitive prennent un nouveau sens depuis quelques jours et l'annonce de probables nouvelles sanctions encore plus strictes émanant de la part des USA.
Depuis l'été dernier, les USA ont prononcé un embargo sur la marque chinoise, accusée d'utiliser ses dispositifs de télécommunications pour organiser un espionnage au profit de Pékin, et ce, à travers le monde. En conséquence, certaines sociétés américaines n'ont plus l'autorisation de collaborer avec la marque, et si certaines sanctions ont été levées, la plus importante concerne Google et l'intégration des services mobiles du groupe américain dans les smartphones de Huawei.
Huawei P30 Pro_35
Face à la situation, Huawei a réagi et développe ses propres alternatives, décidé à s'émanciper du bon vouloir américain pour continuer à développer ses parts de marché... Mais les USA pourraient aller beaucoup plus loin pour stopper net la marque sur le terrain du smartphone.
Dans des propositions de nouvelles sanctions, il est évoqué un amendement qui permettrait aux USA de contraindre Huawei à ne plus se fournir de composants ou services quand ces derniers intègrent plus de 10 de propriétés intellectuelles américaines.
Mais la mesure pourrait aller encore plus loin : les USA pourraient tout simplement contraindre les sociétés qui exploitent du matériel américain ou des licences américaines à ne plus collaborer du tout avec Huawei, sous peine de se voir retirer les licences d'exploitation ou le matériel en question.
Huawei P30 Pro_37
Le problème est donc le suivant : même si Huawei dispose de ses propres SoC, la marque ne les produit pas elle-même et c'est le fondeur TSMC qui s'en charge à Taïwan. Or, TSMC utilise en grande majorité du matériel américain dans ses processus de fabrication, et aucune chaine de production ne mise sur du matériel 100% chinois...
En clair, les USA pourraient trouver là un moyen de pression permettant de priver Huawei du moindre composant électronique et assécher ainsi sa production de smartphone.
Il est actuellement très difficile de penser que les USA pourraient aller jusque là dans sa guerre commerciale avec la Chine, qui par ailleurs pourrait appliquer des conditions similaires dans une foule d'autres domaines. Cette alternative pourrait d'ailleurs déclencher une véritable cascade de mesures protectionnistes à travers le monde entier et ce ne sont certainement pas les meilleurs leviers à pousser d'un point de vue diplomatique ou économique, mais comme toujours avec les USA, il est avant tout question d'intimidation.
Toujours sanctionné par l'embargo américain, Huawei n'est pas en mesure de proposer l'accès aux Google Mobile Services sur ses terminaux. Et selon un cadre de la marque, la situation ne changera pas, même si les USA levaient les sanctions.
Mise à jour du 31/01/2020 13h30:
Huawei a tenu à apporter une précision supplémentaire en réponse à notre article : "Une version libre de droit du système d’exploitation et de l’écosystème Android reste notre préférence, cependant si nous ne pouvions pas continuer de l’utiliser, nous avons la capacité à développer nos propres système d’exploitation et écosystème"
Article d'origine :
Huawei est sans doute allé trop loin pour faire machine arrière désormais : un cadre de la marque chinoise affirme ainsi que la marque ne souhaite plus réintégrer les services de Google dans ses terminaux, même si la levée de l'embargo américain était prononcée.
Cela fait des mois que la situation stagne : depuis la fin du mois de mai 2019, Huawei a été placée par décret sur la liste noire des sociétés chinoises avec lesquelles les marques américaines ne peuvent plus collaborer. Si quelques assouplissements ont eu lieu depuis, Huawei n'est plus en mesure d'utiliser la version d'Android de Google, ni ses services. Cela implique aucun accès au Play Store, Gmail, Maps et autres produits signés Google.
Si le marché asiatique est de toute façon peu intéressé par les services de Google, la marque règne sans partage sur l'Europe et le reste du monde, et Huawei a été déstabilisé par la situation.
Mais la marque s'est rapidement tournée vers Android AOSP, et lancé un plan d'investissement colossal pour attirer les éditeurs et développeurs sur sa propre plateforme : Huawei App Galerie.
La situation reste assez problématique pour les utilisateurs, et pourtant Huawei ne souhaiterait plus faire machine arrière : selon un cadre de la marque, le géant chinois a trop investi pour revenir sur les services de Google, et la situation a été vécue comme un élément déclencheur pour initialiser l'émancipation de la marque vis-à-vis des USA.
Huawei P30 Pro_35
Le Mate 30 Pro, premier smartphone de Huawei à sortir sans services Google
Huawei ne veut plus être dépendante de Google, et plus que cela, la marque souhaite désormais se poser en concurrence directe : Huawei pourrait ainsi proposer ses propres services à tout un ensemble d'autres marques asiatiques pour doper l'adoption de ses outils.
Même si l'embargo américain vient à être levé, rien n'indique qu'une nouvelle sanction n'interviendra pas d'ici 1 an ou même plus rapidement et Huawei ne souhaite plus être suspendue aux décisions politiques de la sorte.
La marque reste réaliste et s'attend à une baisse des parts de marché sur l'année : la gamme P40 ne proposera pas les GSM, et il faudra du temps aux utilisateurs et beaucoup de communication pour faire valoir les alternatives de la marque.