WRITTEN ON July 21st, 2005 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Online Maps

Stefan Magdalinski, founder of UpMyStreet and other cool stuff, writes to set out his frustrations about the Ordnance Survey’s commercial policies.

I feel strongly about this. OS charges developers £500 even to have a play with any of the data…then you have to share your business idea with them. This policy fails to create any decent sites or apis or interfaces. It’s generally monopolistic and has effectively destroyed a vast amount of value for the nation.

Britain was absolutely the world leader in cartography 10 years ago.

In 5 years, we’ll be nowhere, and I think it’s OS’ fault for trying to extract monopoly rents out of taxpayers’ data. This chokes innovation until the eyes pop out of its head. It’s as bad as GCHQ sitting on public-key cryptography, letting Whit Diffie get all the credit, and losing Britain the opportunity to lead in what became a mult-billion dollar industry.

Both were phenomenally bad economic decisions.

The public sector sites the OS might point to are disappointing. Now they could be improved overnight and save a bob or 100 just by re-implementing with Google maps. Oh the irony.

There’s been more innovation using Google maps in the last *week* than OS has ‘driven’ since 1994. I have to say that it’s not for lack of quite a few of us trying.

I love maps. But I’d win an OS one with mixed feelings.