[jfoster]

I don't mean that their solution will necessarily be better than Google's, but it looks like it could produce top-down imagery that is about as good. Being OpenStreetMap, it will likely be liberally licensed. With the data freely available, the barriers to everyone creating Google Maps competitors will suddenly be minimal. Currently those barriers are very significant (data creation/licensing costs), so them being lowered so dramatically will be unfortunate for Google.

[maxerickson]

A significant amount of the data is freely available data produced by the U.S. government(s). The issue is processing it into something nice.

The level of coverage that can be done with that data can sort of be inferred from this post:

https://www.mapbox.com/blog/mapbox-satellite/

(they basically processed landsat imagery to get large scale data for the entire globe, and free imagery of the US gets quite a bit finer scale)