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OpenStreetMap: The Next Wave Of Commoditization For Startups
- bergie 15y agoThe original post from Nestoria that this article refers to was already on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3392851 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3392851), but I felt that this quote plays pretty well also into today's discussion about why startups don't use .Net: Open source allows people to get prototypes up and running for the price of a PC, which is great for trying out ideas with live code. And yet despite these zero-cost origins, open source software scales up to supercomputing levels - the perfect solution for startups that hope to grow. Today, no startup would consider doing it any other way, which means that the initial competitive advantage of taking the open source route has largely vanished In my view, the big advantage with OSM is that you get the actual data, not just pretty map pictures. This allows you to do all kinds of rendering changes, but also to use the data for searches, geocoding, and other things.