I'm curious why the hostility. Isn't Google's positioning little more than a simple factor in your decision making process as to which mapping provider you wish to use? Indeed, I'm wondering why the HN crowd isn't _upset_ at the reduced pricing, because now it reduces the incentive to use (and contribute to, improve) OSM.
Yeah, it probably came across as a bit hostile, because trying to get accurate pricing models from various sources was a big pain. Google has/had a lead in this market because of an earlier behaviour of encouraging open/easy use of their maps and APIs. Without much warning, they significantly raised pricing, and now have significantly reduced it, in less than 9 months.
They've lost a lot of credibility, and it's becoming more apparent that the 'do no evil' era mentality there is going away. They didn't drop prices just because they "listened to customers". If they'd bothered to ask customers beforehand, they'd have known $4/1000 is just way too much for most users. Instead, they reacted hastily due to a perceived threat of Apple entering the market, and probably a big exodus of the smaller players who were using them before (also known as tomorrow's larger players).
I think part of the reason for these fluctuations is that certain divisions within Google are under a lot of pressure to be profitable. So maybe Maps were really looking hard to make money because this kind of order came down the line from Page or whomever (I'm sure that division has a comparatively huge budget, with their scale of operations on the ground). After which maybe they realized that the kind of profitability that drives developers away is not what they were looking for.
The whole "do no evil" handwringing is a bit misplaced here, I think. Google is providing a service, they're free to set their prices. They're not trying to sabotage the OSM project, and the api remains free for not for profit use.
What does 'do no evil' have to do with this? That was always more about not being another Microsoft and using monopoly power to strangulate and crush promising parts of the tech ecosystem. Their API pricing foibles are a far cry from that.
Well, google started charging WAY too much, so you have folks with started projects that simply became untenable. And the principal of something for free/cheap becoming very expensive after you've built an infrastructure around something is shady at best.
So - my company uses Google maps as the foundation of one of the features of a couple of our products, and, originally, we had free licenses. But the day we started using them, we had a conversation where we wondered what Google was eventually going to charge us, and when they were going to charge us. As it turns out - our original guesses back in 2004, where just a shade lower than what we ended up paying in 2011. Our volume is lower than others, and we get a lot of value out of each map display - so the pricing (around $10,000/year) is just a cost of business. We certainly don't consider it too much for our needs.
On the flip side - if we weren't extracting much in the way of revenue per copy of software, and/or our volume was really high - obviously OSM would be very attractive, and we would be waving bye to Google Maps, and joining that community (and hopefully helping to improve the material by donating to up-and-coming cartographers if we weren't inclined to utilize our GIS skills).
To some degree, I think Google re-enforced a very, very valuable lesson - if something is being offered very free/cheap, and is one of the foundations of your product, and you don't have a license/contract (e.g. GPL/BSD) guaranteeing you that pricing - be aware that you are at the mercy of that third party and plan accordingly.
We see this on HN over, and over, and over again with companies like Apple that end up screwing businesses that rely on the Apple store/iOS - I wonder if PG has written an essay on that - building your house on other people's foundation.
