"Governments should open all their mapping data" Most don't have a lot of useful data they collect/maintain themselves. It's often easier and cheaper to buy it

"Governments should open all their mapping data" Most don't have a lot of useful data they collect/maintain themselves. It's often easier and cheaper to buy it from some party who gets others to pay for it as well, spreading costs. I used to think like you do, back when I didn't realize just how much work it is to maintain, and then to provide it to all stakeholders in the formats they require. Here in the EU there was a big push 10-ish year ago to make all this information free, at various levels; see e.g. the INSPIRE directive and all work that that caused. Nowadays people have experience with just how much work it is, and have experienced that the promised benefits didn't quite realize (for various reasons). Most enthusiasm is gone, I feel. (as a researcher, all this data becoming free/easy to download has been a huge quality of life improvement for me; but no more than that. I don't feel there is that much new stuff going on that wasn't possible before. Sure, before you had to chase people for weeks and sign all sorts of agreements, but the end results were more or less the same for professionals. Interested amateurs at home would give up in the past, but they didn't/don't produce all that much useful anyway.)