In December of 2022, the nonprofit Linux Foundation announced the creation of the Overture Maps Foundation. This foundation will be an open source program for curating and collating map data across the world. Tom Tom, which makes its own navigation software and devices, has been struggling against Google's market dominance and is one of the key players. And there are other major players including Meta, Microsoft and Amazon.
So those other companies, the big ones, don't make a point of selling navigations. Software. Amazon's A W S offers Amazon location service to allow developers to incorporate location data in their apps.
The foundation's website says at first, it will release basic layers, including building road and administrative information starting in early 2023, and as Google Maps includes this data with street view, there is quite a big mountain to climb for these companies but they say their aim is similar to that of Open Street Map, which has been around since 2004. To encourage the free sharing of geospatial data, it was formed from existing data sets and contributions by volunteers.
The Overture of Maps Foundation will address this in its FAQ promising to make its data available to Open Street Map. So whether or not this will have any effect on Google's near monopoly on mapping software is yet to be seen. Because as we know, Google Maps comes installed on almost all Android phones, so they pretty much dominate right now, and it's gonna take a pretty big leap to catch up or surpass them. So we'll see that is your tech brewed tech brief for today.