Simon Willison’s Weblog

Map Maker for Developers. Tiles from Google’s Map Maker crowdsourcing effort are now available in the JS and static maps APIs on an opt-in basis. Maybe I’m misunderstanding something here, but Google Map Maker seems like a big step backwards for open geographic data. People donate their mapping efforts to Google, who keep them—unlike OpenStreetMap, where the donated efforts are made available under a Creative Commons license.

# 21st February 2009, 9:05 am / openstreetmap, googlemapmaker, google, creativecommons, crowdsourcing, google-maps-api, staticmaps