I was in Cape Town for the annual FOSS4G meeting at the end of September. There we're some interesting groups in attendance including Google, ESRI, the OGC and members from UNGIWG. During the opening session Ed Parsons of Google faced some difficult questions related to Map Maker. Map Maker allows anyone to edit and create map features wiki style but has a very restrictive license:

"By submitting User Submissions to the Service, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display, distribute, and create derivative works of the User Submission."

Google is inviting people to enrich Google's map without providing any means to get the raw data back out of the system. The license is quite different from the Creative Commons share-alike license of the Open Street Map project. However the share-alike license does not allow private companies to sell derivative works using a proprietary model. It seems to me if the license terms fell in the middle of these two that both projects would benefit and prosper.

There we're some excellent presentations from the OpenGeo group on Open Layers and GeoServer along with some excellent innovations in gvSIG and PostGIS. If I have any criticism it is that most of the demonstrations and implementation examples we're quite small. Loading up and styling a shapefile is fairly easy but loading hundreds of complex layers and serving a million+ users a day gets very complex. It would be good to see some more enterprise examples of Open Source GIS tools in action especially in the commercial space. If anyone has one be sure give me a holler.