2009/9/11 Marcin Cieslak saper@saper.info:
I wonder how fast everybody will realize that even with maps local information cannot be substituted. For example, 200meters from where I live Deutsche Bahn has completed construction of a whole new building and a street leading to it, I wonder how fast it will be available on commercial maps. I think that while initial mapping (from nothing) and importing freely licensed data is a problem, the OSM will be unbeatable when it comes to incremental, small updates, just as Wikipedia is.
It'll happen. But whether it'll happen in a completely free manner under the umbrella of projects like OpenStreetMap or whether companies like Google and TomTom can manage the same thing under their proprietary "give us all your data and only get it back in a form that we allow"-term remains to be seen.
Companies like Google are at an advantage because they can throw tons of money at the problem and they have existing well-known applications that people will sign up to. It takes a lot more work to trace a city from GPS traces than from high-resolution aerial imagery that someone allows you to use as long as you map only for them. And if you just care about getting maps on your TomTom or your locked-down you're going to have to deal with whatever mapping company that keeps an iron grip on those devices.