Wikipedia dumps Google Maps
Contributed by: Email on 04/06/2012 01:27 PM
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Wikipedia's decision, announced in a blog post, will no doubt raise more questions about the decision to charge high-volume users of its maps APIs, which use to be free. In March, Google started charging between $4 to $10 per additional 1,000 loads to any site pulling over 25,000 daily loads.
Wikipedia's Yuvi Panda wrote:
Previous versions of our application used Google Maps for the nearby view. This has now been replaced with OpenStreetMap -- an open and free source of Map Data that has been referred to as "Wikipedia for Maps." This closely aligns with our goal of making knowledge available in a free and open manner to everyone. This also means we no longer have to use proprietary Google APIs in our code, which helps it run on the millions of cheap Android handsets that are purely open source and do not have the proprietary Google applications.
Google did not respond to requests for comments.
In the later part of February, Foursquare announced it was removing Google Maps in favor of OpenSteetMap. Apple switched over to using OpenStreetMap data for iPhoto on the iPad and iPhone soon after.
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