[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.