this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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Everything #OpenStreetMap related is welcome: software releases, showing of your work, questions about how to tag something, as long as it has to do with OpenStreetMap or OpenStreetMap-related software.
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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.