Google licenses the imagery for the commercial providers so don’t usually own the copyright. I can’t make any promises about making the imagery available to anybody outside of Map Maker users therefore sorry.

@Frank,

You are able to draw any feature you like on the maps using the api tools, however you must not trace (copy) any feature such as a road for example, or the shape of a lake with the intention of exporting the data to a different application. These are licensing restrictions imposed by Googles commercial data providers.

David Earl, above, and a few others cannot see why people would donate their time to adding to Google Maps. He cannot see the thousands of websites that use Google Maps, and cannot hear the moans of those users when they see that the maps do not have their homes on them.

These users want the big glass of beer.
They will work that hour for that “free” beer. Openstreetmap, for their hour, doesn’t even give them half a shandy - just instructions for a home brew, and the promise of great tasting things to come. (One side effect of making more people mapping alcoholics should be more appreciation of the finer tasting open geodata brews).

Ed is correct, (at this time) most users and developers couldn’t care less where their maps come from. Some may say this view is mistaken - time will see.

I would like your comments on a related issue. As a developer, I would be interested in using Google Maps tiles if I could then draw on top of them in my own program. But my reading of the TOS (http://code.google.com/apis/maps/terms.html) is that this would not be allowed. Is that correct?

regards,
-Frank

Is it (as the copyright notice suggests) (c) Google, not anyone else? And if that’s the case, would you be prepared to make it available for tracing within OSM, as a goodwill gesture - as Yahoo have done, and as a questioner at last year’s State of the Map suggested you might consider?

It is the case that some developers want access to the data, and at this point in time for various reasons I am sorry we are not able to provide it.

Hmm, I don’t know. I think developers would love access to the raw data- think of the mashups you could create with that rather than just tiles. Google have no real idea whether people want or need that data- AFAIK they’ve never given people the choice.

I agree with Rob as well- it *is* competition because it’s another entry in the “marketplace” for people’s time and skills. The question is though, for the majority of motivated people who really want to improve mapping- will they go for the one-way google approach, where their data is sucked into the googleplex, spat out in a single form, and no longer under their ownership, or will they continue with the collaborative, two-way, flexible, openstreetmap approach?

Just because GMapMaker is not open source doesn’t mean it’s not competition…Apache is competition for IIS, MySQL competition for Oracle. Such competition for OSM\CloudMade is a good thing, and recognition of their business model based on user generated data.

I ponder the future success of GMapMaker; why do Google users want to spend time digitizing maps?

Rob

Nope: the data is NOT ‘free’ for users. I cannot get the DATA. I can only VIEW it through Google’s api (still in ‘beta’??? , and can become paid whenever that suits Google …).

Please Ed, do not trouble the water by mixing words like ‘open source’ in this context. We do not want the Google api’s to be open sourced (though you can do very nice things there at Google, and I think we can learn something from that ).
We are talking about open GEODATA here. Of which the whole earth population can have profit, even in cases where Google can’t offer ’services’ because of (too tight) ties with goverments…
Open GEODATA serves a higher cause, and should not be forked in my opinion.

I agree that Map Maker does not provide “a forking opportunity for the creation of open geodata”. However, it does fork the global geo data creation effort. You did not mention what I think is the greatest advantage of open data: it only needs to be created once.

Sjors