The trouble is that the cost/benefit tradeoff of open source vary massively between types of software and data. A few open source projects have been hugely succ

The trouble is that the cost/benefit tradeoff of open source vary massively between types of software and data. A few open source projects have been hugely successful, attracting contributions from many for-profit corporations. Many more are somewhere between useless and abandoned and sorta-kinda useful if you're willing to tolerate various bugs, quirks, and poor UI. The vast majority of all software written will never be open-sourced because of some combination of vertical target markets, the need to be tightly linked to other proprietary things, massive investment needed before it's usable, etc. OSM is an interesting case. I would have thought that the sheer effort required to keep map data up to date across the world would make it severely impractical to have open map data. They seem to be doing a decent job plugging away, but I don't have any data on how good they are at getting really accurate data and keeping up to date with ever-changing road conditions.