MP v. OB: anyone have feelings to share?

bryans wrote:

This train of thought is pretty much why I started this thread. 

I don't understand the support for MP and the hate for OnX unless it's emotion-driven based on a perception that OnX stole - but that's a bit like a songwriter hating an FM station for playing a song they've already released on an album they wanted the whole world to have the chance to hear. 

There’s a big difference though. The users to begin with made contributions with the intent to provide unrestricted access to beta for every climber, without any hope for profit. OB only intends to continue that tradition. But for OnX, the only thing holding OnX back from putting up a paywall is “good faith.” I can’t name a single centralized organization ever that has upheld and sustained for eternity “good faith” in the face of personal profit, be it church, state, or business. As climbing becomes ever more popular, it’s only a matter of time before the dollar signs shine too brightly before their eyes.

Edit: I see now ypu meant to say OB instead of OnX

Redacted Redactberg wrote:

There’s a big difference though. The users to begin with made contributions with the intent to provide unrestricted access to beta for every climber, without any hope for profit. OB only intends to continue that tradition. But for OnX, the only thing holding OnX back from putting up a paywall is “good faith.” I can’t name a single centralized organization ever that has upheld and sustained for eternity “good faith” in the face of personal profit, be it church, state, or business. As climbing becomes ever more popular, it’s only a matter of time before the dollar signs shine too brightly before their eyes.

Exactly, there's nothing to stop OnX from monetizing our free contributions. Then people might be really glad their material was stored over at OB as well where it can still be freely accessed. Why would OnX be spending their $ to legally protect our content from OB if they didn't think our free content could eventually make them a profit? (I.e. in the future charging us for access to the content we gave them for free!)

Also - if OnX doesn't intend to profit off this information exclusively, why do they care? Where is the good faith in that? Why the letter NOW? What are they planning that requires exclusivity to this information?

Additionally why would ANYONE support that? If your intention is to supply information to the climbing community, essentially granting OnX exclusivity is, as others have pointed out, severely limiting the potential scope. At this point you're working FOR OnX, and you're doing it for FREE.   

  Hmm....   weird. 

Maybe, as years go by, this all becomes moot.

Why wouldn’t a pro-open-source climber re-describe on OB the routes and areas they know about that are MP holdbacks? 

Because anyone that feels like they can take my words without permission or attribution is not someone who can be trusted to be a good steward of those words.  Duplicating that information increases the number of places it must be maintained, which is not something I have any interest in.  openbeta also botched their scrape - the route information that was taken from me left out the aid ratings, which is important since those routes are mostly aid, and the routes have a fair amount of objective hazard in extremely remote areas and i don't want anyone to get hurt.

Andrew Gram wrote:

Because anyone that feels like they can take my words without permission or attribution is not someone who can be trusted to be a good steward of those words.

If this is directed at my last post, I am not suggesting taking anyone’s words. Rather, many have climbed those routes. Of those many, any could write a description on OB in their own words. Indeed, this happened a LOT with descriptions going from guidebooks to MP

 Duplicating that information increases the number of places it must be maintained, which is not something I have any interest in.

Like it is now between guidebooks and MP?

OnX and the MP Admins could have chosen a different path. The current one is not a visionary one. Third parties and those who want to share can move forward into the future on their own.

… the routes have a fair amount of objective hazard in extremely remote areas and i don't want anyone to get hurt.

No one person owns the hazards.  Anyone in the know can describe hazards in their own words. Again, this concept is not new - many MP routes came from guidebooks.

M Sprague wrote:

Choice

This. And permission. They took it like they owned it (they don't). I don't give a crap that their "mission" might line up with mine - the ends don't justify means.

And frankly, even if OB had asked, I think the platform is seriously lacking on many levels and lacks the resources to grow in a meaningful way so I wouldn't waste my time with it anyway.

Josh Janes wrote:

I  think the platform [OB’s] is seriously lacking on many levels and lacks the resources to grow, so I wouldn't waste my time with it anyway.

Maybe. Maybe not.

(am post-limited in this thread for the day)

time will tell. trailforks already charges for MTB trails which are managed and submitted by unpaid admins. they get by this ethical dark grey area by "it works on the website for free" just not offline in the app, exactly when you'll need it most

Josh Janes wrote:

This. And permission. They took it like they owned it (they don't). I don't give a crap that their "mission" might line up with mine - the ends don't justify means.

And frankly, even if OB had asked, I think the platform is seriously lacking on many levels and lacks the resources to grow in a meaningful way so I wouldn't waste my time with it anyway.

Ok now I’m confused.

If you could snap your fingers and make MP open source, would you not do it because of the threat that people would start pulling your data and publish it elsewhere without permission? If so, where is the alignment between your mission and OB’s? Or if you would snap, then what’s the difference between OB users pulling data that you would anyways hope for on MP? 

In the earlier days, couldn’t people pull route descriptions and other data all they want? What permissions were there to hope for at that time?

Dave, sunk cost fallacy?

Also people do funny things when they get awarded their own little fiefdoms.

onX: for profit

admins: for ego and onX 

OB: for climbers but ui gore

climbers: 

M Sprague wrote:

It would be detrimental to OnX to piss off a whole lot of climbers who are active in the outdoors community and energetic enough to spend a lot of energy posting information into the community.

Hosting MP provides a base of users who are introduced to OnX who may be interested in their other products and be willing to up-subscribe for them. They have acknowledged they are trying to find the best balance of nudging people towards being paying customers and not being oppressive with it, and that there have been a few hiccups while trying to find that balance. I don't see any ill will or nefarious activity. They are a business that needs to be viable in order to host and manage MP. Personally, I think a little bit of commercial interest in MP helps keep the quality up: They have a reputation of quality to uphold and they can make executive decisions when a pure community supported site can get lost in infighting or burned out on managing. 

Nothing in your response to my concerns addresses a single point I made in the concern I had and makes it so obvious you dont actually care about the benefit to the community from the community backed freedom of information we've had that we are concerned we are going to lose and instead are more or less sold out to this platform.  This is not about OnX its about the information, OnX will do their best but they have an agenda that is not open source information.

I agree OnX has done really good for us over the past few years but they are obviously not the perfect solution given how many folks have voiced concern here (and I'm not saying at all OB is just to be clear).  Wiki Climb or something, idk but there are better solutions out there and your selling the community short if you are going to settle for this crap.  Are these contributions made for OnX or for MtnProject?

J L wrote:

Dave, sunk cost fallacy?

Also people do funny things when they get awarded their own little fiefdoms.

What sunk cost? You mean they’re pro blocking the API? Why isn’t it said outright? I mean, whats the point in saying your mission might align with OB’s if there’s not a single thing in common besides a website that displays climbing beta?

I could care less if someone says they want status, profit, respect etc. for their contributions. Nothing wrong with that, this is what guidebook authors are. But you can’t have your cake and eat it too, saying you’re all in purely voluntarily nonprofit for the community.

Personally, I think so many of the route descriptions are plagiarized from guidebooks, not just the ones that are directly lifted. Even if you write your own description of the route, if you used a guidebook to initially get up that route to form your own assesment, then you still plagiarized that guidebook if you don’t cite which guidebook you or your partner used. That’s probably 99% of MP.

Redacted Redactberg wrote:

 Even if you write your own description of the route, if you used a guidebook to initially get up that route to form your own assesment, then you still plagiarized that guidebook if you don’t cite which guidebook you or your partner used. That’s probably 99% of MP.

That is not plagiarism by any normal definition. That would be about like reading there was a show in town, going and writing a review and having somebody say your review was therefor plagiarized.

Different views, fine, but there is only so much I want to argue with nonsense, so I'll bow out of this conversation for now. edit - Pardon, a bit rude.

Redacted Redactberg wrote:

Ok now I’m confused.

Let me break this down for you:

I like: Free access to information.

I don’t like: Theft of work + no attribution, archaic website, lack of features, no app, and years behind MP.

I do not speak for other contributors or admins.

Josh Janes wrote:

..,, archaic website, lack of features, no app, and years behind MP.

Yes. That’s how monopolies kinda work, Josh (not the “theft” part). And MP does not have the long term vision 

M Sprague wrote:

That is not plagiarism by any normal definition. That would be about like reading there was a show in town, going and writing a review and having somebody say your review was therefor plagiarized.

A review is just an opinion, route description is not just an opinion. The route’s comments could be opinions. A route description is providing valueable information. You used that information to keep you in good shape on the route. Look at any guidebook, they often cite in a preface their inspirations or influences if they are not the first. It is plagiarism by every normal definition in any academic sphere. If you use information that directly informed your research, you MUST cite it.

M Sprague wrote:

That is not plagiarism by any normal definition. That would be about like reading there was a show in town, going and writing a review and having somebody say your review was therefor plagiarized.

Different views, fine, but there is only so much I want to argue with nonsense, so I'll bow out of this conversation for now. edit - Pardon, a bit rude.

This is an accurate and helpful analogy, but his grasp of metaphor is as strong as his handle on plagiarism.

Just finished reading through this, and got my own take on it to share. 

Instead of OB, lets first think about someone writing or updating a paper guidebook. I think that author should be free to browse MP, and freely use any fact-based information without any attribution: Name of climb/area, first ascent information, required/recommended gear, location, .... Now I hope that they would verify that information, but that's not required. I would think the vast, vast majority of people who submit that information would be happy to have the information that they share used like this (that's the whole idea of sharing it in the first place), This type of data Is also not copyrightable.

On the other hand, they should not be able to use anything that has any significant creative expression, or is subject to copyright - history, stories about the climb/area, topos, pictures, extended/interesting/creative descriptions of climbs, extended descriptions of how to access, etc. Unless the author of that work gives permission, in which case it's also fine - look at a guidebook near you, and the photos in that guide - unless they were all taken by the author, they should all be attributed to the photographer. That is where OB went wrong, in a big way, in my opinion. Even though MP does an imperfect job of attribution, they do mostly record things such that you can figure out who wrote what. OB should not have copied without that, and were rightly called out on it. 

This goes the other way as well. As MP note, you shouldn't add information (or photos) etc., that you just copy out of an existing guidebook, or that you do not have the rights too. On a personal note, I'll always support a guidebook author over sites like MP. If you're travelling, buy the local guidebooks, and use MP to supplement is my credo.

Now there's a large grey area between a climb description like "Follow the crack, 2-3" gear" and "After 30 feet, just before the crux, look for a small pod on the right, which only takes a small offset cam. Without this piece, the climb will be runout. I have the scars to prove this!" I am not a lawyer, but the first almost certainly doesn't qualify for copyright, and the second could well be, so copying it verbatim is probably wrong. Fine if our putative guidebook author goes and verifies it for themselves and/or rewrites it in their own words, and/or gets permission to reuse or quote.

The other thing OB did wrong was just bulk scan everything. Regardless of anything else, this is clearly against the terms of use. 

What I'd like to see is a way for people adding new areas/routes etc. to indicate that they are fine with people taking their text and reusing it with attribution. Maybe a boilerplate check box when you add something that indicates a license preference (e.g. just CC-BY would be fine with most here I suspect). You'd still have to have someone manually (vs. automated scanning) copy that, but that's their problem, not MP's.