[dasil003]

Authoritarianism is not a solution, but neither is the magic of the free market when the dynamic is increasingly consolidated wealth looking for ever faster returns due to the technology cycle.

The idea that a non-profit could compete in the current economic and cultural climate is laughable. Some social change is required, and government for all its flaws is the logical place for such change to actually gain some teeth.

[manigandham]

The idea that a non-profit must compete is what's laughable. This service is expensive. Who's going to pay for it? Taxes? Subscriptions? Ads again?

The free market is exactly what allows anyone to compete, and Apple and Microsoft already do so, along with dozens of industrial providers.

[dasil003]

Non-profits can't afford the engineers to make a maps service work well at scale. Sure, Google is entering the revenue extraction phase of their existence, so it opens the door to competitors, but who will fill that gap? The non-profit version will be shitty compared to the next VC-funded startup paying engineers $200-$500k each to build a world-changing maps service, which they give away for free in order to grab marketshare, then they crank up the price and the cycle repeats. The low barrier to entry when the web disrupted Microsoft was an anomaly, even despite increased open source tooling, VC boom times have sucked the oxygen out of the room for non-profits and bootstrappers trying to build great tech products.