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Apple Switches (Mostly) To OpenStreetMap
beelsebob writes "In the recent release of iPhoto for iOS it appears that Apple has started using OpenStreetMap's data. Unfortunately, there are still some problems. Apple is currently not applying the necessary attribution to OSM; they are using an old (from April 2010) dump of the data; and they are not using the data in the U.S. Fingers crossed that Apple works through these issues quickly! Apple is now one of a growing list (including geocaching, and foursquare) to Switch2OSM."
Yeah. Because Apple never gives back to the digital community. Oh. Wait. http://www.apple.com/opensource/
So, yeah, I'll take that bet.
Whilst OSM is very good for free data, there are still pockets of areas where the coverage is very poor indeed. I had to map out half of my uncle's town as it just wasn't there on OSM (about 9 months ago). At every stage, it's getting better, but the more 'big players' that start to switch to it, the more momentum it will get and the better the coverage will be as more contributors flow in.
This is especially the case as parts of the OSM dataset are about to be wiped out due to the forthcoming remapping.
They are using OpenStreetMap in one iOS photo editing application that costs $5. I would hardly call that "mostly switching." More like the first toe in the water.
The map tiles are certainly Apple's own - they have defined their own stylesheet, with their own look.
However the map data those tiles were rendered from appears to be a mix of TIGER in the US and OSM elsewhere. TIGER is a public domain dataset from the US Census Bureau, and OSM is CC-BY-SA.
Looking at the shape of the data is often enough to tell you where it came from. One one level it's modelling the same reality, but in practice mappers tend to make slightly different versions of "the same" object (a road might be smoothly curved, or quite angular, depending on how much effort they went to). As such you can quite easily see when data comes from the same source, even if it's rendered in a different style.
It's pretty conclusively OSM if you look at which small features (footpaths, lanes within a car park, etc) are rendered. This data isn't present in the commercial datasets you can licence from people like TomTom, however it is in OSM (neither Navteq nor TeleAtlas have footpaths, or this kind of micro-mapping of lanes within parking areas).
Based on things like this, typos which appear on both maps, and roads that are in OSM now but aren't in Apple's tiles - it looks pretty clear that they used a snapshot of OSM, specifically one from early April 2010.