Some of the biggest players in the mapping industry are trying to create new open source services that will challenge the dominance of the company.
The Linux Foundation announced an open project on Thursday that is meant to give new map projects a home. Several other major companies have come out of the woodwork to support it in what seems like a bid to end the dominance of the internet giant. The companies include Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services.
The Overture Maps Foundation is an open source program that gathers map data from a variety of sources. The project promises to use the massive amount of global data housed by these various companies and from outside to build up-to- date maps that developers can use. This new project will level the playing field for anyone who wants to develop up-to-date services without breaking the bank on expensive commercial data that may not be accurate.
Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, said in the release that mapping the physical environment and every community in the world is a massive challenge.
All the companies involved could have a stake in that. Michael Kopenec, general manager of Amazon Web Services, said in the release that map data is "cost prohibitive and complex." There are applications in both virtual and augmented reality for Overture. Microsoft and the company have worked together on street mapping data.
Even though it was cited for selling users' location data, its street view and augmented reality capabilities keep getting better, leaving its competitors in the dust. More than 220 countries and territories have been mapped by the company. Maps is the most downloaded gps app in the world.
In countries where the top performing app wasn't available, the company has survived against the competition with deals. A new map platform was announced last month. The world of maps is very fragmented, according to an internal Q&A by Eric Bowman. Everyone who is making a commercial map, whether they admit it or not, is starting to see that there are limits to what any one company can do, no matter how powerful or wealthy they are.
Harold Goddijn, CEO of TomTom, said in a release, "Overture's standardization and interoperability base map is fundamental to bringing Geospatial Information from the world together."
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