Some of Google’s biggest rivals are coming together to create new open-source services to knock Google Maps from its mapping throne.
The nonprofit Linux Foundation unveiled its own open project on Thursday with the intention of gathering new map projects using readily available statistics. And a number of other significant businesses have come out of the woodwork to support it in what appears to be an effort to end Google’s tyrannical geolocation sway. Among them are TomTom, a Dutch geolocation business, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and others.
This Overture Maps Foundation is essentially an open-source program for curating and collating map data across the globe from multiple different data sources. So, in essence, the project promises it will use the massive amount of global data housed by these various companies and from outside to build up-to-date maps that developers can then use. Linux also promised this new project will essentially level the playing field for anybody looking to develop up-to-date geolocation services or maps without breaking the bank on expensive commercial data that may not even be accurate.
In the release, Linux Foundation’s Executive Director Jim Zemlin said “Mapping the physical environment and every community in the world, even as they grow and change, is a massively complex challenge that no one organization can manage.”
While Google and its parent company Alphabet were combining its Maps and Waze teams, its street view and AR capabilities keep getting more sophisticated, leaving its potential competitors in the dust, even after it was cited for selling users’ location data. That domination is so great that Google Maps has mapped more than 220 countries and territories, according to the company. Maps is the most-downloaded GPS app by far, and it’s not even close, it added.
