Another project collecting GTFS feeds is transit.land. You can find a lot of non-Western countries there: https://www.transit.land/places

The point is, nowadays everywhere in the world they already use some software for the management of public transport. It would help more if you would write to the local public transport companies and ask them to publish their timetables in the standard, machine readable format.

The workflow of creating bus routes is very similar to what you discribe in JOSM.

Personal opinion: I think we shouldn’t map bus routes manually for multiple reasons:

• Modern public transport companies publish their GTFS feeds usually with a compatible license. There are projects going on to import them to OSM or to combine them in end user applications. There are a lot of usable examples for the latter already, e.g. https://transitous.org/
• They are hard to verify on the ground, you have to travel on the bus in question to make sure it actually uses that street, not the next one, if there is no bus stop nearby.
• Long relations are prone to bork themself. Just check the invalid bus routes on osmi, most of them have a gap, they are hard to fix and maintain. Just zoom in anywhere: https://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/?view=pubtrans_routes&lon=16.33692&lat=39.75409&zoom=2&baselayer=Geofabrik+Standard&overlays=ptv2_routes_invalid%2Cptv2_error_ways%2Cptv2_error_nodes copy patste the link if it’s not working: https://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/?view=pubtrans_routes&lon=16.33692&lat=39.75409&zoom=2&baselayer=Geofabrik+Standard&overlays=ptv2_routes_invalid%2Cptv2_error_ways%2Cptv2_error_nodes

On average 6000 people work on osm daily globally, creating 40000 changesets. That’d around one changeset per 3 seconds.

You can browse statistics like these here: https://osmstats.neis-one.org/

Some people write that to changeset comment. Osmcha even flags changesets using such terms automatically.

If something is suspicious, I can ask them in a comment. They can lie, but most people do this because they don’t know it’s illegal.

How I understand it, they wouldn’t have to release it if they do it correctly. ODbL allows some mixing with proprietary sources, as listed here: https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Community_Guidelines/Horizontal_Map_Layers_-_Guideline

The principle that a map maker can make and publish a map made from several distinct horizontal layers without being obliged to share data from the non-OpenStreetMap layers has been established for several years and is much clearer with the switch to the ODbL. Here we formalise and state what we are happy with and give examples that we hope will help potential OpenStreetMap users with incompatible sources.

https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Community_Guidelines

I think it isn’t:

• First of all Hanlon’s razor.
• It doesn’t affect map users and rendering clients directly, as they display extracts, they don’t use the main website directly.
• Power users also work with offline clients, e.g. I download the data, work on it offline, then upload it, so what I notice from this is sometimes the download or upload times out, but I just retry it and it works after a while. It’s annoying, but not a big deal from my point of view.
• I think it mostly affects casual mappers, who add a lot of very important data, but by volume it’s much smaller than the data contributed by the big mappers. There was a very good presentation about this in 2014: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/SotM_2014_session:_The_Long_Tail_of_OpenStreetMap
• It affects mostly sysadmins, who will burn out.

Bing is owned by Microsoft, and Microsoft is a platinum corporate member of the foundation, it means they pay at least € 30,000 annually.

They won’t disappear soon, they need map data and the other option would be to paying to google.

Actually Ms, Meta, Amazon started to support osm because they figured out they can’t really compete against google individually, supporting an open project is cheaper than developing their own maps, or paying millions to google (remember, google maps is free only to individuals, companies have to pay a lot). They don’t really have other option, and the license of osm is very corporate friendly.

It’s illegal, you should report it if you are sure it was from osm. But I guess they get data like that directly from municipalities, or road construction companies, or from the traces of users they spy on

They used to use some data from osm, public transport in some parts of Poland, and they displayed the required attribution correctly:

https://xcancel.com/MapAmorePH/status/1453863816110952450

I have a feeling, it’s just some users who copy from osm to gmaps, and they don’t know it’s illegal. They are already not the smartest people on earth, as they work for free to a for profit company…

I think Google’s fault is mostly just not enforcing copyright laws. I’ve never seen something on gmaps copied from osm, but I reverted a lot of changesets because they copied from google. So your experiences are not as general as you think

Google doesn’t use osm officially. I don’t know the status of Apple, while they may use some data from osm, their map is very different

There are big companies who use it (Microsoft, Meta, Amazon), and they donate money and manpower, they have employees actively working on osm.

You can see organised editing activities here: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Organised_Editing/Activities This is where they should document how they contribute data.

Financial sponsors are listed on the webpage of the foundation: https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Corporate_Members

About your perception of copying from osm: a lot of data on those maps are contributed by users, who may copy it from osm or may not. This problem is actually as old as mapmaking, the only way to prove they copy your map is to include “trap streets” and see if it shows up in other maps.

It’s not a secret, this page lists like 20 ways how to download data, depending on your use case: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Downloading_data

Unfortunately it requires an actual brain to read and understand that article.