Super cool, there should be more competition between Map providers like Apple/Google/OpenStreetMaps.
Why couldn’t this project have just been things being added to OSM?
My thought exactly – why not contribute to OpenStreetMap?
Steering members: Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, TomTom. They won’t contribute to OSM because they don’t want map data to be free for everyone; they just don’t like Google and Apple being in charge of it.
So they actually are contributing / complementing OSM:
Overture is a data-centric map project, not a community of individual map editors. Therefore, Overture is intended to be complementary to OSM. We combine OSM with other sources to produce new open map data sets. Overture data will be available for use by the OpenStreetMap community under compatible open data licenses. Overture members are encouraged to contribute to OSM directly.
From the FAQs on their site.
Aha, I see that now, too.
It’s kinda funny; everywhere I saw this posted had the same initial comments, “what about OSM?” Which I think is natural and good skepticism.
Hopefully, they keep true to their word instead of creating the same problem.
