We are thrilled to announce that the OpenStreetMap Foundation has been selected by the Sovereign Tech Agency for a service agreement in the amount of 384,000 EUR over two years to ensure the stability, growth and modernization of OpenStreetMap’s core software.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Tech_Fund
The Sovereign Tech Fund is a funding program from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, aimed at providing financial support to open-source software. The initial funds were allocated by the Bundestag in May 2022.
In 2022, the program had a budget of 13 million Euros,[7] which increased to approximately 22 million euros in 2023 and is expected to reach up to 16 million euros in 2024. The program is initially attached to the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovations and is led by Adriana Groh and Fiona Krakenbürger.
Seems like a good group with a decent budget. I’m actually surprised so much was allocated to them. I really hope they’re not doing a Mozilla w.r.t their pay
The Sovereign Tech Fund has supported a lot of @gnome@floss.social development in the last year, great org.
Would be awesome if this somehow results in in-app life traffic data but I doubt it.
Doesn’t Google control it?
Otherwise users of OSM apps would need to share the data but I doubt it would be enough
There are APIs that can be used though obviously that depends on the country of region. That’s surely not easy to implement but they’re where money funds come to play.
Obviously, even money can’t just magically bring in features, that’s for sure.
Magic Earth has traffic and uses OSM data. It’s closed source, but they seem to be one of the better map/navigation companies when it comes to privacy.
Their live traffic data’s comes not from OSM. It is not publicly known what their source is for this data.
They say they use crowdsourced data, presumably from users, then “send it to a provider” to combine with other data. Not ideal, but (hopefully) not Google. LOL
I don’t think you can have in-house live traffic data without having many million active users. But it would be nice!
Garmin has for a long time had live traffic data supplied by municipalities before smartphones became popular. But I’m not sure what you meant by “in-house” (surely not literal!).
The data obviously has to come from somewhere, and it’s usually a third-party in the case of small apps like this.
For Magic Earth to be truly private in this regard, the assumption is that they would need to stop passing information off to third-parties, which would also mean they’d need to collect and parse the traffic data themselves (i.e. “in-house”).
I don’t think that would be feasible, nor would be very accurate with a small user base.
Even if municipalities could provide live traffic data, I can’t see it being accurate beyond city centers and highways, since they can’t monitor every road out there.
That said, I don’t know who the big players are in this space (for traffic data), since I rarely drive and no longer need this feature. LOL
Yeah, I know magic earth but as you said, it’s closed source. Also it’s only a navigation app. You can’t easily search and browse restaurants, like with organic maps or Google maps. Not intuitively at least. So you would still need a second app for that.
They’re hiring a “facilitator”? So, not someone who does actual real work? /s
