Monday long-time Slashdot reader denelson83 wrote: The crowdsourced, widely-used map database OpenStreetMap has had a hardware failure at its upstream ISP in Amsterdam and has been put into a protective read-only mode to avoid loss or corruption of data. .
The outage had started Sunday December 15 at 4:00AM (GMT/UTC), but by Tuesday they’d posted a final update:
Our new ISP is up and running and we have started migrating our servers across to it. If all goes smoothly we hope to have all services back up and running this evening…
We have dual redundant links via separate physical hardware from our side to our Tier 1 ISP. We unexpectedly discovered their equipment is a single point failure. Their extended outage is an extreme disappointment to us.
We are an extremely small team. The OSMF budget is tiny and we could definitely use more help. Real world experience… Ironically we signed a contract with a new ISP in the last few days. Install is on-going (fibre runs, modules & patching) and we expect to run old and new side-by-side for 6 months. Significantly better resilience (redundant ISP side equipment, VRRP both ways, multiple upstream peers… 2x diverse 10G fibre links).
OpenStreetMap celebrated its 20th anniversary in August, with a TechCrunch profile reminding readers the site gives developers “geographic data and maps so they can rely a little less on the proprietary incumbents in the space,” reports TechCrunch, adding “Yes, that mostly means Google.”
OpenStreetMap starts with “publicly available and donated aerial imagery and maps, sourced from governments and private organizations such as Microsoft” — then makes them better:
Today, OpenStreetMap claims more than 10 million contributors who map out and fine-tune everything from streets and buildings, to rivers, canyons and everything else that constitutes our built and natural environments… Contributors can manually add and edit data through OpenStreetMap’s editing tools, and they can even venture out into the wild and map a whole new area by themselves using GPS, which is useful if a new street crops up, for example…
OpenStreetMap’s Open Database License allows any third-party to use its data with the appropriate attribution (though this attribution doesn’t always happen). This includes big-name corporations such as Apple and VC-backed unicorns like MapBox, through a who’s who of tech companies, including Uber and Strava… More recently, the Overture Maps Foundation — an initiative backed by Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and TomTom — has leaned heavily on OpenStreetMap data as part of its own efforts to build a viable alternative to Google’s walled mapping garden.
The article notes that OpenStreetMap is now overseen by the U.K.-based nonprofit OpenStreetMap Foundation (supported mainly by donations and memberships), with just one employee — a system engineer — “and a handful of contractors who provide administrative and accounting support.”
In August its original founder Steve Coast, returned to the site for a special blog post on its 20th anniversary:
OpenStreetMap has grown exponentially or quadratically over the last twenty years depending on the metric you’re interested in… The story isn’t so much about the data and technology, and it never was. It’s the people… OpenStreetMap managed to map the world and give the data away for free for almost no money at all. It managed to sidestep almost all the problems that Wikipedia has by virtue of only representing facts not opinions. The project itself is remarkable. And it’s wonderful that so many are in love with it.
“Two decades ago, I knew that a wiki map of the world would work,” Coast writes. “It seemed obvious in light of the success of Wikipedia and Linux…”
