Having tried recently to build an app using POI (restaurants) information derived from OSM I've been left both simultaneously in love with the idea of OSM and s

Having tried recently to build an app using POI (restaurants) information derived from OSM I've been left both simultaneously in love with the idea of OSM and sad by the reality of it. The idea that we all have an open map free to use by developers and users not controlled by a rent collecting corporate entity should be wonderful resource for humanity. The practicalities are often unfortunately far from wonderful: 1. A lot of the POI data in OSM is often either out of date, wrong or incomplete, including names, web addresses, phone numbers, closures, etc. 2. They often don't have addresses as you're supposed to resolve the address from the location, but if you have multi-story buildings this gets problematic. Part of this I believe is due to the community requirement that this data come from folks walking around vs from providers that say restaurant owners use (square, toast, etc) to manage their online presences. Google Maps is just dominant in terms of gravity with folks are throwing all their photos and reviews and edits on there. But if google maps had to build google maps on the Places API google itself would be out of business the prices and terms are so out of control. But even in the more open space you've got: 1. Overture trying to to make OSM actually usable by combining multiple data sources and doing validation. But overture is up to 1 month or more out of date. 2. MapBox and others are trying to make money selling improved POI data on top of OSM derived data with their own sources added. I ended up building a system that combined OSM (for freshness) plus Overture for reliability plus validation, but no data duplication from google maps to filter bad data coming from OSM and Overture.