One Man Decided to Take on Google Maps, 20 Years Later OpenStreetMap Is Still Going Well

From internet protocols and operating systems to databases and cloud services, some technologies are so ubiquitous that most people don’t even know they exist. The same can be said for OpenStreetMap, a community-based platform that provides companies and software developers with geographic data and maps so they can rely a little less on the proprietary entities that dominate the space—yes, that mostly means Google.

OpenStreetMap is the brainchild of Steve Coast (pictured above), a University College London “dropout” (as Coast himself puts it) who has since worked in various mapping and location-related roles at Microsoft, TomTom, Telenav and — as of today — Singaporean ride-hailing company Grab.

Coast is no longer directly involved with the OpenStreetMap project, but in a blog post published Friday to mark its 20th anniversary, he cited two earlier open-source success stories that convinced him something like OpenStreetMap might have a future.

“I knew two decades ago that a wiki map of the world would work,” Coast wrote. “It seemed obvious in light of the success of Wikipedia and Linux. But I didn’t know that OpenStreetMap would work until much later.”

While OpenStreetMap is a bit like Wikipedia when it comes to maps, the comparison to its encyclopedic counterpart is rather superficial — yes, both are giant collaborative projects, but there is a huge difference between sharing your expertise on micronations and mapping geographic features on a global scale.

OpenStreetMap now has more than 10 million contributors who map and refine everything from streets and buildings to rivers, canyons, and everything else that makes up our built and natural environments. The starting point for all of this is data from a variety of sources, including publicly available and contributed aerial imagery and maps from governments and private organizations like Microsoft. Contributors can manually add and edit data using OpenStreetMap’s editing tools, or they can even go out into the wild and map a completely new area themselves, using GPS, which is useful when, for example, a new street appears.

As Coast’s sole creator, he was the driving force behind all of its early software development and advocacy work, eventually founding the UK nonprofit OpenStreetMap Foundation in 2006 to oversee the project. Today, the foundation is supported primarily by donations and membership, with fewer than a dozen board members (elected by its members) guiding key decisions and managing finances. The foundation has just one employee—a systems engineer—and a handful of contractors who provide administrative and accounting support.

OpenStreetMap’s Open Database License (ODbL) allows any third party to use its data with proper attribution (though attribution isn’t always provided). This ranges from large corporations like Apple and VC-backed unicorns like MapBox to tech companies like Uber and Strava, the latter of which uses OpenStreetMap data to map roads, trails, parks, points of interest, and more.

Recently, the Overture Maps Foundation—an initiative backed by Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and TomTom—has begun to rely heavily on OpenStreetMap data to create a viable alternative to Google’s walled-off mapping system.

There is no doubt that OpenStreetMap has been a success over the past 20 years. This success would not have been possible without the Internet and the human desire to create something of value that everyone could own.

“OpenStreetMap managed to map the world and make the data available for free, almost for free,” Coast notes. “It managed to bypass almost all of Wikipedia’s problems because it represented only facts, not opinions. If OpenStreetMap is a medium, what’s the message? To me, it’s that we can go from nothing to something, or from zero to one.”

Beyond affordability and accessibility, there’s at least one other good reason why open mapping data should exist—and it all comes down to the notion of who gets to “own” location. Should corporate behemoths like Google really have control over this? By any reasonable estimate, a monopoly on location is not a good thing for society—as OpenStreetMap contributor and free software advocate Serge Wroclawski notes:

“Place is a shared resource, and when you give all that power to a single entity, you give them the power not only to inform you about your location, but to shape it.”