I’m purely speculating here: I believe Overture finds OSM “off-putting” because Overture cannot own / control OSM as it wishes. It seems to bother Overture greatly that a successful crowdsourced project full of altruism, damn good data, a real (kind, helpful-to-others…) community-ecosystem which continues to grow over years (decades, really) into not only some of the best mapping on Earth, but a SYSTEM of mapping, all based on volunteers giving of ourselves and our local (and wider) geographical knowledge. That rocks.
I’m not saying that with aggressive lawyers and/or billions of dollars, “something else” can’t “compete” with OSM — it probably could or can — but Alphabet’s Google Maps, while it might be considered “a competitor” to OSM, still has many shortcomings compared to much of OSM. Same for TomTom and Apple and Bing and others that are out there. I don’t want to “rest on our laurels” and smugly insist “we’re the best damn map on the planet and nobody can touch us…” because with that sort of hubris, we are easily dislodged from our august and likely premier position. OSM must always be looking in our rear-view mirror at “the approaching competition.”
Perhaps one of the things that OSM might “do better for our own sake” is to better articulate “what our place is in the world of mapping platforms.” I’d like to say we are one of the premier mapping platforms, with some of the best data, constantly improving (as are our tools, community, documentation, education, outreach, ability to help newer users with guidance and improvement…). But if that’s not true, and “somebody is eating our lunch,” well, let’s roll up our sleeves and get busy being better.
It can be difficult to talk about such things, as such “quantification” (such as saying “we’re the best map”) isn’t easy to do and especially because doing so can be highly subjective. But in the cold light of day, OSM is able to look at something like Overture’s recent .alpha-0 release and say “kinda junky, with old, noisy data from the trash heaps of commercial social media, redolent with the low quality one might predict comes from such an endeavor.” I don’t think that’s too far off the mark, but of course, it behooves us to keep our eyes wide open (towards additional, future releases).
The first pickle out of the barrel often is funky. What matters (SHOULD matter to OSM) is how much better Overture gets in the future.
