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There are parts of the world that have much better OSM coverage than Google maps, e.g eastern Indonesia. I don't think OSM is ever going to beat Google in for instance New York City but it absolutely can and does beat Google in parts of the world that are not profitable for Google to map. That's the problem with a for-profit map: consistency.

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The exact same problem exists with volunteer-maintained maps. In fact it's even worse there because at least with a commercial map, quality is basically correlated with where the users are. With a volunteer-maintained map, quality is correlated with where the volunteers are, which is not necessarily going to be where the users are.

Thousands of volunteers specifically map remote areas they don't live in through the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team

Every local municipality already maintains GIS data, I imagine that some day these systems will automatically integrate into a public, open database like OSM.

Sidenote, the FOAM project is doing some interesting work into geospacial data on-the-blockchain.

At a regular (bi)monthly/quarterly OSM meetup we were joined by representatives from 2 or 3 local municipalities. It seems they might be interested in unification to reduce costs, but I didn't ask for details.

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