> This is like telling your IT manager "we should use this very incomplete library. The code is open, so any missing functionality or bugs we can fix ourselves!

> This is like telling your IT manager "we should use this very incomplete library. The code is open, so any missing functionality or bugs we can fix ourselves! This will be a great benefit to our coders, so they can crack their knuckles on some problems they don't usually get to work on." There are plenty of organizations that do this. Google spends thousands of developer hours and millions of dollars contributing to open source projects. And it's not just for the developers: they recognize a better resource and use it. When their needs outgrow the library's capabilities they add to it. There are at least a few companies doing this exact same thing for OSM data, too. For example, MapQuest and Bing both use OSM data in some of their products and contribute data and tools/source back to OSM. > ...developers may be interested in contributing to OSM (I know I am), but how many are willing to ship this in a production environment, where the goal is to build a great product, not baby-sit an incomplete data provider? As I've previously mentioned, OSM is certainly inadequate in many places (and the community is working really hard to fix that -- thanks for contributing!), but in some places it's _MUCH_ better than Google. It's certainly a business decision: do you want to pay Google $10k+/month (where it was $0/month not 2 months ago) to run your site or do you want to use OSM? If your business's primary area of interest is Europe (especially Germany), then you probably want to use OSM. If you want to cover the entire world or don't want to deal with the lack-luster-but-improving data in the US, then use Google.