Great app. There is also https://every-door.app/ that gives you slightly different set of tasks and allows you to place POI easily. I recently mapped a lot of trash cans and benches around my neighborhood while walking with my dog.
StreetComplete lets you place trash cans and benches too (among other things) using the "Things" overlay. IMO Every Door has a much more complicated UI, though it's also more of a full featured editor than StreetComplete. (Though still less so than something like Vespucci.)
Is that a new feature? I have over a thousand contributions on StreetComplete (casually using it during walks) and somehow I never noticed that button.
The overlays are intentionally a bit hidden, since they're more of a power-user feature and I appreciate that StreetComplete retains beginner-friendliness as a core tenet. But the overlays are indeed awesome for survey-type walks where you just want to make sure that all sidewalks are mapped correctly, or to see which shops are still missing.
The UX is really bad. POI loading is taking 10+ seconds to update, then any zoom or pan reorders the list of locations. Most of the missing info (around me) is just phone numbers and hours of operation, which are boring and should be trivial to collect automatically.
The thing is that the best way to get the phones and opening hours is to walk in person and look them up. Any source for the automated collection is way more likely to be outdated/wrong than what the sign or the person behind the counter tells you. And can also have non-permissive license not compatible with the OSM license.
Raw Information cannot be licensed, and I am not sure why OSM sticks to the policy that it can.
Google Maps does not hold the rights to which opening hours Bob's Bakery keeps. If someone entered them from Bob's Bakery their site onto Maps, you are free to type it off of Maps onto OSM. Legally anyway. OSM themselves still hold the policy you can't, so you should adhere to that.
That doesn't fly for several reasons, one of them another commenter already mentioned. See these pages for why we can't copy facts from proprietary sources:
It's too bad you guys aren't incorporated in the EU[0].
Looking at that, Google is only allowed to protect its content with database rights for 15 years after publication, with "substantial additions" getting the same 15 years from the moment of their publishing. I bet there is an interesting legal argument in if modifying opening hours or location of a PoI is considered a "substantial addition", because otherwise any PoI (including businesses) added up to July 2011 would be fair game now :). Not that OSM has the financial means to fight off a behemoth like Google.
Tbh, even then, OSM itself states:
"The project is not an exercise in copying maps while trying to avoid copyright traps. We create maps without copying at all! That is the challenge we have set for ourselves.", so the point is moot.
I do wish Apple would just incorporate OSM's PoI data. Right now their's is complete garbage compared to Google Maps and OSM, missing vast swathes of info (or being woefully out of date) in almost all cities.
We broadly aim to be legal worldwide since it's not very cool if we get outlawed in e.g. Australia and businesses there can't use OpenStreetMap for anything, can't download OsmAnd there, MapComplete is blocked from browsers, etc. Incorporating in the EU was actually a consideration due to Brexit (don't remember the reasons) but it sounds like the benefits didn't outweigh the effort of moving, seeing as it hasn't happened
Interesting though that there's this different (15 years) term where normal copyright is just about forever. That's going to come in handy somewhere for datahoarder me I'm sure :D
I wouldn't be surprised if Google’s lawyer army could explain to some Google-paid arbitrator how it’s in their interest to find that such behavior violates Google’s database copyright under legislation of Google’s choosing.
The amount things you can map in OSM is impressive. However I ran into two things that have no formal tags: time capsules (historic=time_capsule), and camera obscuras (camera_type=obscura). You can add the values, but they are not official. Time capsule is in the work [0].
