I work for the government, we work in Geospatial Information matters, that provides topographic maps, basemaps, natural features of our country, one of them is rivers.
There are some suspicion of evidence here and there that even Google Maps using some of our vector features. We can see it clearly when zooming in, the shape and angle of every drawing is exactly the same.
Unlike roads, small rivers should be more unique from one company to another company to draw, because it’s not really clearly seen from satellite imagery. So when it’s exactly the same shape and angle of every vertex, it’s seems they copied ours. Ours are drawn in early 2000s.
But our data can be downloaded easily and free in our website, that’s must be the case, it’s free. But some recognition and attribution could be nice though.
Yea I guess you’re right.
And I think we are more than happy we have something that used by other people, for greater community
Certainly it is better than just ended up in box on our warehouse, or just a file in a server no one will ever see it exist, (unless they are academia, scientists or other bodies of government that needs that maps for their work).