When I read about Overture Maps like a year or 2 ago, it seemed to me that basically they were going to create a whole new thing from scratch.
Let’s be honest, with enough resources, it’s easy to see that they could pull off some kind of OpenStreetMap 2.0, where all the issues from OSM are modernised and cleaned up.
What’s really going on? Are we getting something soon from these people? What’s the relationship with them?
On their website, they say “coming this fall”. Are you excited? Scared? What should I think?
It doesn’t actually matter too much. They use mostly our data, so legally I think it’s ODBL too, and we can import anything genuinely useful they do.
Overture is a separate project so they can add stuff OSM doesn’t want like data generated from imagery that is not checked by people. That might make Overture better in areas where osm data is sparse. They can also restrict other things only import tags they like, or merge some tags that mean similar things to make it easier for data consumers.