OSM, waze, Map Maker announce ClosedStreetMap Alliance

Thu, Apr 1 2010 EMABARGOED 9am PACIFIC TIME

Heading: Ground-breaking map providers join forces in new common base map

"Big Three announce strategic alliance at WHERE 2.0 conference 2010"

Mountain View, CA, Tel-Aviv Israel and San Jose, CA.

After many months of negotiation the OpenStreetMap Foundation, Waze Inc. and Google Inc. have agreed a common licensing, technology and community platform for hosted crowd-sourced data. Agreeing not to split the community of potential mappers in three, this agreement sets the tone for the next decade in mapping

Google's Map Specialist Ed Parsons said "Today the challenges of a building a global map go beyond Google's focus on search. Combining efforts with Waze and OSM allows us to focus on a common enemy of TeleAtlas and NavTeq."

Building upon Googles online MapMaker tools, Waze's fleet of free PND software and OSM's global community, closedstreetmap.org will cherry-pick the best tools and skillsets of each partner.

Waze's Di-ann Eisnor had this to say: "We realised fighting Google, OSM and TomTom is not a pragmatic solution to our geodata needs. Further, why try to own everything? There are only so many cherrys and cupcakes our users are willing to drive around to find."

OSM, Google and Waze will pool their map data and close down their respective map-making efforts, focusing on a common platform at closedstreetmap.org.

Steve Coast, Chairman of the OSM Foundation believes strongly in this combined future: "By joining Waze and Google, we admit that creating an open map was never going to work as quickly as we'd like. By being honest about that and sharing our data under the CDbL we benefit from the combined expertise we share to build the dataset, whilst contributing a community ready to be engaged."

The CDbL, or Closed Database License, fits both Google's and Waze's needs to monetize a wholly-owned dataset whilst providing a ready and enthusiastic community to build the map.

There are many benefits beyond the initial partnership. NavTeq CEO Larry Kaplan said "We can all breathe a sigh of relief here in Chicago. We have a few more years in our business model yet, and here we were thinking we'd be dropped like 3rd period French."

The OSM community responded enthusiastically to the announcement with key members Andy Allan, Richard Fairhurst and Tom Hughes jointly saying: "We respect the economics of closed software and data - it makes more sense in the long run, let's face it. We'll look at the last five years of building maps as a bad dream, a mere prelude to a better future with closed data and restrictive licenses."