>Conversely the cost of things like Google Maps (as a service not as a consumer in this context) has risen dramatically so naturally big companies are turning t

>Conversely the cost of things like Google Maps (as a service not as a consumer in this context) has risen dramatically so naturally big companies are turning to the free offering more and more and the worry is they will have outsized impact in the project and become the dominant body and their priorities will be pushed forward over others I don't know if this has changed with newer versions of the google maps API, but years ago when I had the choice of using google maps or OSM, the biggest motivator in my decision, when OSM was still a lot less complete, was to do with Google's licensing. There was a clause that implied they'd have some rights to reproduce and use our data and that was totally unacceptable for our use case. OSM was completely free to use without worries that google was somehow going to be able to use our data in some way.