2012/3/1 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
Other companies doing similarly:
http://blog.nestoria.co.uk/why-and-how-weve-switched-away-from-google-ma http://www.fubra.com/blog/2011/11/24/google-maps-free-alternatives/
... And, in case anybody missed this piece of news, so will Wikimedia's official mobile app in version 1.1, now in beta.
A further bit of information in case people aren't aware of it:
A number of Wikipedias (noticeably ru-wiki, de-wiki, es-wiki, fr-wiki, it-wiki, pl-wiki, fa-wiki, ca-wiki, da-wiki el-wiki, lv-wiki, nl-wiki, no-wiki and possibly some others I don't know of) have already included OpenStreetMap maps in geo-referenced articles through the osm-gadget ( http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilfe:OpenStreetMap/en ). Some of them since over a year. The maps are rendered for now on, and served by a server provided by the toolserver project.
So yes, the model imho works well and can hopefully eventually be included in en-wiki as well.
This server also renders maps in all of the 200+ Wikipedia languages, provided the data is available in OSM ( http://toolserver.org/~osm/locale/ ), although due to performance reasons they are afaik not currently in production other than on the ru-wiki. In order to make different language maps feasible for production in all Wikipedias, Wikimedia-de is funding a project to try and find a scalable solution. ( http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Kolossos/CPB )
Kai