[bprasanna]

Yes, it's free and good. Im not complaining about the Google Maps as a product, but i'm complaining about the system built around Google Maps. 1. I don't know how many contributors of Google Maps know the API side of the story. If they knew that will they be ready to contribute for free? 2. Though Google might have touched about selling user data in Terms & Conditions, the Terms & Conditions themselves are big trap worded with complex sentences having many pages. Yes, i may be lazy/dumb not to go through pages of T&C, and i accept that part of my mistake. 3. For a Google Maps contributor, when they contribute apart from giving them the points and appreciation, Google never tells them their contributed data is going to be sold in the form of API (in a visible manner). Whereas in YouTube the contributors do know, they may get compensated upon N number of views.

In overall the point is similar to everyone's complaint on Google, "User data is being used to their favour" but my expectation is for Google to openly and visibly tell that so all the competitors have level playing ground.