Comments on: Open Street Map beats Google Maps for business use.

By: David Gerard

David Gerard — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:03:23 +0000

You’re paying Google to do the calculation, serve the tiles and so forth as a service. As Sebastian Delmont notes, they didn’t actually save any money – doing it themselves costs them engineering time and hosting. But they have complete control and can’t be gouged worse later, by anyone.

By: Kate

Kate — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 13:19:06 +0000

Wow. That is way, way more expensive than going to the source of Google’s data.

By: Steve Bennett

Steve Bennett — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 04:37:23 +0000

Yeah, I don’t really get why OSM is still so massively underfunded and undeveloped. It’s still where Wikipedia was in, oh, 2004? There are some real differences in the communities (partially, imho, because “map makers” and “encyclopaedia makers” have different personalities). And the community really hasn’t matured in the way Wikipedia’s did: there are *still* no policies, no guidelines, and a vehement belief that rules are bad, and lack of standardisation is a strength, not a weakness.

For all that, the OSM data is pretty good (in some parts of the world it’s truly excellent), and there are lots of good tools out there.

What other rent-seeking business models? Well, we’re basically talking about models that charge for access to large, slow-moving datasets. Business directories might be a good target – something OSM doesn’t do well, but some third party could.