Regarding Google's Mappers, I find it absolutely absurd that the guy interviewed would spend 10 hours daily and even signing an NDA just to help, as the article says, "one of the world’s richest companies" for free. And then instead of acknowledging his stunt they just ban him. If only he'd discovered freely licenses projects like OpenStreetMap where the data belongs to everyone and where the community is put first. That's why I can't stand crowdsourcing, you're essentially doing free labor just to make some company's crappy data better for yourself. It's a nice bit of social engineering which masks the true beneficiary of the scheme and hides the actual power structure.
> The company is dominated by software coders, and they want to solve the most interesting problems, or create the coolest products.
This remark also rings true for software in general, no one wants to maintain "legacy" code or do maintenance in lieu of new features. That's why we have so many rewrites and NIH syndrome. Of course higher-ups incentivize this because it makes it look like the products are growing and innovating, leading to cruft like a random program evolving to send email.
I totally agree, I've contributed myself to OpenStreetMap for a few things which were not totally correct and I this way at least I know it's something everyone (including myself) will be able to use it after.
Oh they're well within their rights to do that. However my complaint had to do with the fact that one of their higher ranked volunteers was trying to point to an issue with the system after being dismissed and instead of trying to work with their community and address it, they just ban him instead. To quote him:
> For me, it was always like I was looking at a five-alarm fire,” he said. “To them, it was smoldering.
> The company is dominated by software coders, and they want to solve the most interesting problems, or create the coolest products.
This remark also rings true for software in general, no one wants to maintain "legacy" code or do maintenance in lieu of new features. That's why we have so many rewrites and NIH syndrome. Of course higher-ups incentivize this because it makes it look like the products are growing and innovating, leading to cruft like a random program evolving to send email.