OSM maps (was: Re: TomTom on Openmoko?)

[Marcus Bauer]

On Thu, 2008-03-27 at 14:46 +0100, Marcin Juszkiewicz wrote:

> > The coverage of the Netherlands has already commercial quality (go and
> > have a look) - actually it is already better than commercial data and
> > in the US the governments TIGER data has been imported.
> 
> Compare that with other parts of world.

Okay, check out the following links:

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=33.319914,44.403477&spn=0.097541,0.160675&z=13

http://openstreetmap.org/?lat=33.3285&lon=44.3873&zoom=13&layers=B0FT

This is twice Baghdad, once Google maps and once OSM.
If you happen to live in a place where TeleAtlas gives a sh*t about, you
wont get any maps at all. If you now check google, than you will see
that TeleAtlas gives sh*t about two thirds of the world.

I can't see, why the european governments don't publish their street
data - which was already paid by the tax payers, i.e. us. Thus if Poland
has no good data, just write an email to the political parties and ask
them why not give the data to OSM?

I think this is the power of open source! The democratic empowerment of
everybody - not just people living in first world countries.

And last not least OSM starts to get there where Wikipedia already is:
map that are up to date. See this link for the new terminal in
London-Heathrow:

http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=286


And last not lest a link to mapping in second/third world countries:

http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=285


The Open Source Movement at its best!

Best regards,
Marcus