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One of the great bright lights of open-source software and user-driven community projects is OpenStreetMap, which offers an open-source mapping platform similar to, but also very philosophically different than, Google Maps.
It manages to duplicate most of Google Maps using primarily the contributions of enthusiastic users, too.
In my experience, OpenStreetMap is every bit as accurate as Google Maps and quite frequently surpasses it, particularly outside the US. That it is even anywhere close to Google Maps is a testament to massive amount of time and effort the OpenStreetMap community has invested in the project.
One place that Google Maps has always had OpenStreetMap beat, though, is Google Street View, for which – until relatively recently – there was no OSM equivalent.
Telenav, one of OSM's major supporters, has now launched a new project dubbed OpenStreetView with the goal of crowdsourcing street-level photography for OpenStreetMap across the globe.
Experience for yourself at https://www.openstreetmap.org.
(Score: 5, Informative) by nishi.b on Thursday December 15 2016, @09:35AM
It depends a lot on location.
For example in France, OSM got access to all the "cadastre", that is all public records of buildings, roads, rivers... So it is very accurate, and usually better updated than google maps.
In most cities, the mapping is much better than google maps (street numbers), I found this equally true in the moutains here (alps) to locate water sources or hiking paths.
As for the rendering, OSM is a database of geolocated data, and multiple map tiles can be rendered according to the kind of information you want to display.
There are maps for hikers, for bikes, for cars, for public transports that display the relevant informations from the database.
Some are listed here : http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Featured_tile_layers [openstreetmap.org]
It is also used in emergency situations (Haiti for example) to map undamaged roads for humanitarian aid for example.
As it depends on local people and/or the will of governments to share mapping information, it is very lacking in some places (for example small cities in Bangladesh), but it is getting better.
You can use OSMAnd on Android; it allows to download and use offline the map of the area you are going to visit.
And OSM API allows you to download anything you want from the database (I created a small software myself using part of it).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @09:00PM
Google Maps had numbers and a lot of other info that later was removed. It also became slower as mentioned in other replies and they had the "courage" to run polls asking about that when you tried to use the previous interface, yet unsolved since the change became default. Removal of numbers and extra info could be blamed in wanting to extract the info from you (search for exact place or feature instead of pan around and check the numbers or bus stops or museums yourself), speed problems... going cheap and using less servers?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by segwonk on Sunday December 18 2016, @06:29AM
Yes, came here to say that I have discovered a lot of hiking trails that I would never have found on Google maps. Now I always check OSM before traveling to a new place to see if there's anywhere I want to hike.
.......go til ya know.