[NBLUG/talk] corrected link to City of SR tech surplus auctions & Linux Foundation competitor to Google Maps

[Derek B. Noonburg]

On Fri, 16 Dec 2022 12:58:41 -0800
Brad Morrison <bradmorrison at sonic.net> wrote:

> Well, I screwed up the first link to the City of Santa Rosa's
> technology auctions 
> (https://www.publicsurplus.com/sms/ci.santa-rosa.ca.us,ca/list/current?orgid=14286), 
> so while I'm correcting that, here's another story I read this
> morning about an effort coordinated by the Linux Foundation to bring
> a valid competitor to Google Maps into being. It seems to have quite
> some big names attached to the project, but we'll see how much they
> are willing to invest. 
> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/linux-amazon-meta-and-microsoft-want-to-break-the-google-maps-monopoly/
> 
> I'm sure that Derek will be happy to hear that!

Indeed!  That does look like good news.  Skeptic that I am, though, I'm
going to wait and see just how open they are.  (Amazon, Meta, and
Microsoft... that doesn't make me super-optimistic.)

From my point of view as an un-Googled Android phone user, the biggest
problem is lack of a decent mapping app.  The OpenStreetMaps data is
actually ok in my experience (not great, but mostly good enough) -- but
there's only one open source Android app that I've found, and it's not
so great.

I ran into someone a while back who's pretty familiar with OSM, and he
pointed out that they're set up to distribute datasets, not so much to
be a real-time data provider for applications.  So one barrier is that
any good mapping app will need some servers (could be AWS or whatever)
to host the map data.  It's not clear where an open source mapping app
will get the money for that.

- Derek