Roadguide Philippine v. 2.07 unlocked + demo 2.08

**vortex8** · 18th April 2012, 05:12 PM

I'm not a contributor to Roadguide.ph but I can understand what dong 1432 means, although he could have been a little bit mellow in his reply. For sure, there are great maps out there from the other part of the world that are open to the public and thriving. But the main difference with them is the local culture here in the Philippines. People do tend to be a bit lazy here and they would rather get the map for free and walk away rather than voluntary helping in improving the map. So what might work in other places doesn't necessarily mean will work here.

Take the case of OSM Philippines vs. Roadguide.ph maps. By just comparing the amount of map data between the two maps, it's very clear that Roadguide.ph is a clear winner. I have both maps in my GPSR (ver. 2.01 from Roadguide and latest OSM map) and routing is much better with Roadguide map. OSM is open and free, yet it seems that less people are interested in contributing data there. Maybe the leaders of Roadguide see this scenario, hence their decision to continue to keep the map available to contributors only. Forcing people to contribute is a working formula for them, and makes their map much better than the competition.

And to be fair to leaders of Roadguide, they licensed their maps to other companies, but I believe older versions of it and with agreement from contributors. I've been lurking at that site for quite some time now and at least that's what my understanding is from the posts of the mods. If you're pissed off that your contribution will be licensed later, then don't give it to them. But judging at how their map continue to improve, it seems most contributors don't mind that as long as at the end of the day, they get the latest map version for free.