I don't care about perks or rewards, I just want a free and open license database that enables me to find and contribute gas prices in my area without spying on me. I've searched AlternativeTo.net, but nothing open source comes up. Thanks!

top 8 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] muzzle@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Gas Prices is Germany only, but maybe you can ask the author to enable other countries?

[–] Zykino@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago

I recently found https://f-droid.org/packages/net.canvoki.carburoid

Work we state provided data in Spain and France. I saw an issue requesting to add Italy. You may request your country too

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 2 points 1 day ago (3 children)

GasBuddy's primary source is a crowdsourced user database. Kinda hard to recreate that at a FOSS level, as it will inevitably require a centralized server.

They also use OPIS, which is a subscription-based database. So who's gonna pay for that?

[–] yo_scottie_oh@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I'm not following. I understand how Gas Buddy works (crowd sourced data entry), but how does that preclude free and open source software? For example, look at OpenStreetMap, open license database w/ a whole ecosystem of free and open source apps built around it.

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Imagine if you had to recreate OSM every hour. Because that's how often gas prices change.

[–] prenatal_confusion@feddit.org 1 points 1 hour ago

Do you object to the need to get the new prices manually or just the data processing involved? Because other than osm it's very little data.

Getting the data would be harder since people would need to participate like on GasBuddy. Maybe some scraping?

[–] TheFogan@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I mean easy enough to recreate it with a more open database, but yeah key issue is userbase. Same flaw with trying to make a better dating site, or anything else location specific. It's barely feasible for things like lemmy and mastadon where we pull from international pools of people that mostly don't care if the other users are 500 miles away.

When you try to do a facebook equivelant, doesn't really go anywhere because, people don't need just people, but people they actually know.

and yeah trying to get "people in the same city".

as obviously one guy just reporting the gas stations around him, for an application that only he uses, is just a fancy notebook, and the real problem is would he continue using it long enough for a second to appear and make it actually beneficial for anyone.

[–] Bongles@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 day ago

I wonder how many api requests you'd need to accomplish something usable that you supplement with crowd sourcing.

Seems like you could do something with this https://www.zylalabs.com/api-marketplace/data/us+gas+cost+finder+api/5922#pricing
(I clicked around a bit on opis, couldn't easily find pricing and moved on)

But if you're in the thousands a month, you'd need to be wealthy enough to not give a shit, or already need a solid userbase and to start monetizing it.