In the news among aviation enthusiasts, the ADS-B data aggregation and aircraft tracking site ADSB-Exchange has been sold by its founder to JETNET for a reported $20m. ADS-B Exchange is a community driven site whose data comes from thousands of enthusiasts worldwide connecting their ADS-B receivers to its feed API. The sale to a commercial flight data company has not gone down well with this community, who are unsurprisingly unimpressed that their free contributions to the website have been sold.
This certainly isn’t the first time a site built on community data has flipped into big business, and while it’s unclear whether JETNET will do a full CDDB and boot out anyone not paying to play, we can understand the users feeling that their work has been sold from under them.
Apparently the deal is done, so contributors will have to wait to hear how this affects them. But I’d imagine a commercial company is going to make money off of the service, and of course all those contributors have been contributing for free.
See https://hackaday.com/2023/01/26/ads-b-exchange-sells-up-contributors-unhappy/
#technology #adsb #aircrafttracking #crowdsourcing