Re: How "open" is OpenStreetMap?
"scores really badly on consistency of coverage." is a reasonable criticism. It's a problem I've given a talk about in fact https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/2011/10/10/sotm-talk/ As the community maps more and more detail, we do become consistent within the more important feature mapping. So you give footpaths as an example. It's an interesting one because while we may be inconsistent in footpath coverage currently, I would guess this one is very solve-able with more volunteers getting involved. Meanwhile there's higher detail things like mapping every tree and bench, where we'll probably struggle to consistently do this for many years to come (but if benches and trees are not your use case, this may not be a problem)
"Topology is quite questionable". Well please question it. Try planning route, and if you find it refusing to take you through a junction which should be joined up, please use the "Notes" feature to report an issue, or (since you know how to) make an edit yourself. My experience in the UK, is that the road network is very well mapped for routing purposes, so the becomes a use case which OpenStreetMap serves just as well as other providers and in a free and open way. With march of mapping progress we will swallow other use cases too. But if you're referring topology of footpaths, I agree that is an issue. We should improve it where we find bugs, but particularly in urban settings it's a very difficult thing to achieve fully joined up pedestrian routing. We're improving it steadily, but may never manage it completely.
Google do not supplement using OSM. We would like it if they did, but they don't because they want to own it all themselves. They don't want to be giving credit to OpenStreetMap and sending map data users there instead. I know of one occasion they were caught supplementing using OSM in a south american country, which they say was due to buying data from unscrupulous suppliers (I understand they apologised and removed the data)
"First of all there's the licence, which isn't open at all". Well that's rather sweeping clearly incorrect statement. OpenStreetMap data is released under a free and open license. As I'm sure you are aware, it's not "copyright free". It's an open license. It has restrictions designed to keep the data free. Now however you feel on the issue of whether OpenStreetMap should be using a "share-alike" license (The requirement to share back changes/improvements made, and disallow locking down the data and making it more closed) ...your objection, you must surely admit, is a lot more nuanced than just saying it "isn't open at all".
Biting the hand that feeds IT
