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Hello everyone: We are now considering OpenStreetMap and GoogleMap for our product. One concern is how to minimise the potential risk. If OpenStreetMap is able to be closed by some party, the risk will be much higher compared with using GoogleMap since Google seems like to be much stable. Thanks |
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Google maps could be shutdown by a unilateral decision by Google. This is highly unlikely, but entirely possible. More plausibly, Google could change the pricing plan for their services, and make it unaffordable for you. Or your business could just grow in such a way that your income doesn't make it possible for you to pay for their services. Due to OSMs licensing, anyone can fork OSM at anytime. This is a good thing, because as long as the OSMF does a good job of managing the database and the community then there is no reason to fork the project. If OSMF fails for some reason (about as unlikely as Google closing down maps) then others could continue development of the database, and (with some work) convince the (largely volunteer) contributers to come over to their project and continue development. In simple terms, OSM cannot be shutdown. It is important to realize that OSM doesn't provide services like Google does. They focus on maintaining the database and the community of contributers. You'd be buying services (serving tiles, routing, whatever) from other organizations, who've based their products on the OSM data. Again this is a good thing, because it's a more competitive market, with various people providing competing services. Another possibility would be to just download OSM data, and roll your own tiles or routing, or whatever it is you require. One of the strengths of OSM is flexibility and access to the data. With that comes reliability. |
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"OpenStreetMap" is the database. You can download the data file and use that. It doesn't matter if the openstreetmap.org website closes, you still have your file. And there is open source software which you can run on your machine(s) which work with that file and provide useful services (like tile rendering, geocoding and routing). And that'll always be there. The worst thing that happens is that no-one contributes to OSM anymore, and your data file will not get updated. But you still have the file and the data. No-one can take that away from you. |
