In an effort to dethrone Google Maps from its position atop the map market, some of Google’s major rivals have formed a sort of rogue gallery. A new open initiative from the nonprofit Linux Foundation is intended to gather new map projects using public resources. And a number of other significant businesses have surfaced from hiding to support it in what appears to be an effort to remove Google’s tyrannical geo-location rule. This Overture Maps Foundation is essentially an open source tool for curating and aggregating map data from various data sources all around the world. So, in essence, the initiative promises to leverage the huge amounts of global data kept by these many corporations as well as data from other sources to create up-to-date maps that developers can then use. This new effort, according to Linux, will effectively level the playing field for anybody wishing to produce up-to-date geolocation services or maps without breaking the bank on pricey commercial data that may or may not be accurate. According to Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, “mapping the physical environment and every community in the globe, even as they expand and evolve, is an enormously difficult job that no one organisation can undertake.” Everyone who is charting a commercial course, whether they confess it or not, is beginning to see that there are limitations to what any one corporation, no matter how large, strong, or well-funded, can achieve.”
