What is the relationship between Overture and OpenStreetMap?
> Overture is a data-centric map project, not a community of individual map editors. Therefore, Overture is intended to be complementary to OSM. We combine OSM with other sources to produce new open map data sets. Overture data will be available for use by the OpenStreetMap community under compatible open data licenses. Overture members are encouraged to contribute to OSM directly.
How will Overture data be licensed?
> Data contributed to ODbL licensed datasets will be contributed under both the ODbL and CDLA permissive v2. Contributions to CDLA permissive v2 datasets will be contributed under the CDLA permissive v2.
How will Overture code be licensed?
> Overture’s open source code will be subject to the MIT license.
So basically, they're going to use Open Street Map's data, but as a data source to their own project. They won't be giving their efforts to improving OSM?
I think the focus on Overture is going to be on machine-generated data like imagery-based mapping. Unfortunately it isn't really super practical to feed this kind of thing back into the OSM project right now (extremely high change rate makes it hard to review changes, OSM process for approval of automated imports is oriented towards a high level of reliability that this data doesn't always have). I think maintaining this kind of data separately from OSM but still permissively licensed makes a lot of sense, and will benefit the OSM project as these data layers will become useful sources for the manual, human-intelligence-based mapping that the OSM project is really built around.
Or to put it a little differently: from my experience with OSM politics (not expansive but also not that small), the OSM project probably doesn't want this data. It would become a huge headache for OSM contributors to do QA on. There have been multiple notable incidents of companies starting to feed automatically generated data in to OSM and getting lambasted for it. Keeping it separate from OSM but available for use with and for OSM is the respectful thing to do.
That's how I view this too. Increasing the 'demand' for OSM's data will be a net good since it guarantees a future where companies are using it and reliant on it. Not burdening them with all of this extra info that they don't want and can't reasonably steward makes a lot of sense. It's hard to see how this is anything but a big plus for the OSM community.
> We combine OSM with other sources to produce new open map data sets.
I worry that they will proceed to claim that it means that they do not need to actually attribute OSM. Well, Facebook for example is already violating OSM license by hiding attribution in places where normal user will never see it - even typical HN user may not click on this hidden button on FB maps.
