You probably don’t realize it, but you’re a direct beneficiary of OpenStreetMap. You may not be one of those who has contributed the 100 million edits to the community-driven mapping project, but if you’re a customer of Apple, Facebook, Uber, Amazon, or countless other organizations, you depend upon OpenStreetMap every day.
For example, I mostly interact with OpenStreetMap when using Strava, which builds on Mapbox’s OpenStreetMap-driven data. Back in 2014 I asked if OpenStreetMap could become the next Linux. Fast forward to 2021 and the number of contributors has more than doubled, even as the number of organizations depending on its open mapping data has skyrocketed.