When I read about Overture Maps like a year or 2 ago, it seemed to me that basically they were going to create a whole new thing from scratch.
Let’s be honest, with enough resources, it’s easy to see that they could pull off some kind of OpenStreetMap 2.0, where all the issues from OSM are modernised and cleaned up.
What’s really going on? Are we getting something soon from these people? What’s the relationship with them?
On their website, they say “coming this fall”. Are you excited? Scared? What should I think?
Eh, when you scroll down to “steering members”, it starts to look a lot less attractive.
Besides the ugly GAFAM corps theres also e.foundation as a contributor… They’re also bad guys?
Not necessarily. Google currently has a monopoly on high quality map data, and it needs to be broken up. Even if they’re doing it out of self interest, as long as all map data is open source and fed back into OSM, it’s a win-win for the rest of the ecosystem. All of those corps are Google competitors who would save a lot of money if they could host an alternative instead of using Google Map API’s, but building out the dataset alone is prohibitively expensive.
My colleagues worked on a transport logistics project that used Google maps back in 2018 or 19, and at the beta release I stressed the product manager to double check the viability given Googles massive price hike recently announced. They didn’t, and a bug resulted in a few hundred k bill, for a project whose bill was only supposed to max out at < 5 k a month for that volume of API calls. Googles price hike and the lack of decent alternatives killed the project.