Open Source Competition for Google Maps

After a 15-year hegemony, it looks like Google Maps could be facing tough competition. That too from the large community of open source developers that forms a part of the Linux ecosystem. Led by the Linux Foundation, a group of the world’s biggest tech companies have come together to develop interoperable and open map data. 

The organization has been named the Overture Maps Foundation, with Linux Foundation taking the lead to counter Google’s domination in this arena. Others in the program include Amazon Web Services, Facebook’s parent Meta, Microsoft and the Dutch mapping company Tom Tom, which incidentally was one that lost the biggest when Google Maps arrived. 

The mission statement of the Overture Maps Foundation is to create or power a new range of map products through open source datasets which can be used interoperably across applications and enterprises. Each of the participants simply adds their own data sets and resources into the mix to make it more robust. 

What it all means to the world?

“Mapping the physical environment and every community in the world, even as they grow and change, is a massively complex challenge that no one organization can manage,” noted the Linux Foundation’s executive director Jim Zemlin says in a press release. He also reiterates that for this to happen, Industry needs to come together for the benefit of all. 

Over the years, the value of maps and location data has grown significantly from navigation to powering devices across a wider spectrum – ranging from logistics to big data visualization tools and IoT devices. Keeping all this data in just one or two Big Tech firms creates restrictions with what others can do with the data – both due to licensing costs and styming creativity. 

Of course, each of the big tech companies that have weighed in on Overture Maps have a crying need for spatial mapping. If Meta requires it for their Metaverse, Amazon’s drone delivery plans depend big time on having such data handy. As for TomTom, they would like to get back in business, having lost most of it to Google Maps. 

A report published in TechCrunch quotes Jan Erik Solem, engineering director for Maps at Meta as saying that immersive experiences that understand and blend into your physical environment, are critical to the embodied internet of the future. By delivering interoperable open map data, Overture provides the foundation for an open metaverse built by creators, developers, and businesses alike, he says. 

An anti-Google story in the making

That Google doesn’t figure in the list of Big Tech companies on Overture Maps Foundation is no surprise. That some of the biggest names in the tech world are coming together in a venture that aims to challenge Google’s hegemony since the launch of the Android mobile operating system 15 years ago, is quite obvious. 

The value of maps as an easy and largely precise means to navigation took shape with Google Maps and the arrival of iPhones and its map feature back in 2007. What it did was put maps into the pockets of billions across the next decade, leaving businesses such as TomTom gasping for breath, given that their navigation devices were initially stuck on car windshields. 

It’s not that the Dutch company didn’t evolve in the period. They did deals with Uber and Microsoft and targeted developers with SDKs to acquire innovations that bolstered their auto-driving vehicle ambitions. However, for the person-on-the-street, Google’s mapping empire was what they belonged to and where they stayed. 

The company’s CEO Harold Goddijn said in the press release that “Collaborative map making is central to TomTom’s strategy — the Overture Maps Foundation provides the framework to accelerate our goals. “TomTom’s Maps Platform will leverage the combination of the Overture base map, a broad range of other data, and TomTom’s proprietary data in a continuously integrated and quality-controlled product that serves a broad range of use cases, including the most demanding applications like advanced navigation, search, and automated driving.”

It’s decentralization at the core

At the core, the emergence of Overture foundation resonates with global trends across the technology spectrum where decentralization and interoperability is the name of the game, caused incidentally by regulatory and societal pressures. 

In fact, the Linux Foundation also announced the OpenWallet Foundation to develop digital wallets on an interoperable model. This was seen as a direct assault on the close payment ecosystems pushed forth by tech giants such as Google and Apple. The latest announcement on the Overture Foundation just takes this on to a broader trend. 

The companies that have come together now seem to be ready to engage in a collaborating map building program that collates data from open data sources and knocks it into a format that follows a protocol, much the same way that ONDC is attempting in the realm of eCommerce across India. The mapping process would channel data from projects such as OpenStreetMap besides adding open data provided at a hyperlocal level.