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Google Maps has one of the most abusive license practices I've seen; effectively they force every one of their competitors to use OSM. As a consequence, OSM is
by revel 4y ago
Google Maps has one of the most abusive license practices I've seen; effectively they force every one of their competitors to use OSM. As a consequence, OSM is the default for every company in this space.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoA business decision regarding IP is not abuse.
- beej71 4y agoTheir non-abusive license forces everyone else in the space to use OSM. :)
- ipsum2 4y agoAbusive means "extremely offensive and insulting", according to Google
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoOnly if you're part of the entitlement generation that expects everything to be free and nobody should be paid for their work.
- franga2000 4y agoIf it was about wanting everything to be free, Mapbox wouldn't be the most common non-Google map provider. Google's free tier is more generous and their data is usually better. A few points that particularly bother me: 1. Google gets a lot of this data from their users (both from traditional crowdsourcing and sneaky things like tracking Android phones) and then locks it up so you have to pay to use it. 2. The way they license their services forces you to stay in their ecosystem. For example you are only allowed to use Google Places Search on a Google Maps map. 3. There are APIs Google just doesn't provide for various reasons and because they "own" the data, everyone else has to start from scratch (or use OSM). There's no way to download some subset of the data for a one-time sum or even a subscription license and provide your own service on top of it. Yes, these things mostly fall into what people consider a company's freedom to do business however they like. But Google is more than just any random company and the data they gatekeep is more than just any random dataset.