OpenStreetMap

Steve Coast founded OpenStreetMap in 2004 while attending University College London, initially focusing on the United Kingdom, where government-run, tax-funded projects such as the Ordnance Survey created huge data sets but failed to distribute them freely and widely. On August 9, 2004, Coast registered the openstreetmap.org domain, a date later celebrated as OSM’s birthday, and the website went up on August 16. Coast recalled in an interview that the project started from a completely blank canvas, with the first data coming from him cycling around Regent’s Park in London with a GPS receiver the size of a pack of cards.⁠[1][1][1][1][2]

On December 11, 2004, Coast announced on the project mailing list that the website backend and Java applet now supported logging in, deleting points, and loading and adding streets, and that the first street had been entered the previous day; as next steps he envisaged a viewer for browsing static tiles and a wiki-like editing applet reached through an “edit this” link.⁠[3][3][3][3][3]

On July 17, 2005, the project held its first “mapping party” (Map Limehouse) in London, and the 1,000th user registered on Christmas Day that year. On January 22, 2006, version 1.0 of the offline editor JOSM was released; it has been continually improved and remains one of the most used editors. In May 2006, the community held its first concentrated mapping efforts on the Isle of Wight and in Manchester.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1]

On August 22, 2006, the OpenStreetMap Foundation was incorporated at the UK Companies House under company number 05912761 as a private company limited by guarantee without share capital, with its registered office at St John’s Innovation Centre in Cambridge, England. It is not a formal charity but a non-distributing company with members rather than shareholders; if it ceases to operate, its remaining assets must be transferred to an organization with similar aims. The foundation’s purpose is to encourage the growth, development, and distribution of free geospatial data and to provide geospatial data for anybody to use and share.⁠[4][4][5][5][5][5][5][1]

On November 10, 2006, the Mapnik-rendered “slippy map” made its debut. On December 4, Yahoo confirmed that OSM could use its aerial imagery as a backdrop for mapping, removing the practical requirement for contributors to own a GPS device; about half a year later, the online editor Potlatch appeared on the OSM homepage with the aim of making it easier for new users to start.⁠[1][1][1][1]

On July 14–15, 2007, the first OSM conference, “State of the Map 2007,” was held in Manchester, and registered users reached 10,000 on August 7. In September of that year, the project began importing the U.S. Census Bureau’s TIGER geographic data, completing the import for the entire United States on January 23, 2008; AND data for the Netherlands was also imported in September 2007.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

On March 17, 2009, OSM reached 100,000 registered users. On April 21, the project switched to API version 0.6, introducing “changesets,” which group a mapper’s changes from one editing session so that the editing history is easier to trace and review.⁠[1][1][1]

After the earthquake struck Haiti on January 13, 2010, the OSM community launched an appeal for mappers and produced a detailed map within 48 hours. The New York Times described the map built by OSM volunteers as “the most complete digital map of Haiti’s roads, hospitals, triage centres and refugee camps.”⁠[1][2]

On April 1, 2010, the UK Ordnance Survey released open data, which OSM had partly helped bring about. In November of that year, the rewritten Potlatch 2 editor was embedded in the OSM homepage and became the default editor four months later; on November 30, OSM was allowed to trace from Microsoft Bing’s vertical aerial imagery. Steve Coast, by then working at MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry, said Microsoft donated all its aerial imagery to OSM so that users could simply draw features on top of the aerial pictures.⁠[1][1][1][2]

By February 2012, most of the world had been mapped on OSM in varying degrees of detail, with more than half a million registered contributors; most contributors were based in Europe, so there was more detail on bus stops, hospitals, and house numbers in London than in Luanda or Lhasa, and Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, had been a blank spot on the map until local volunteers mapped it with GPS devices in November 2009. Steve Coast said the project followed an open source philosophy, letting users tinker with the underlying data and the software that produces it, which set it apart from other free online map services such as Google Maps.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2]

From 9 a.m. UK time on September 12, 2012, OSM data has been licensed under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL); previously it used the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license (CC BY-SA 2.0). The change was made for multiple reasons after a lengthy process directed by the OpenStreetMap Foundation; the ODbL was developed by the Open Knowledge Foundation and is written specifically for databases, offering the project more protection. Most contributors agreed to the new terms, but some did not, and about 1% of the data was lost in the conversion, after which the community worked to remap the removed content. Data contributed before September 2012 remains available from the archives under CC BY-SA 2.0.⁠[6][7][7][7][7][7][8][8]

On January 6, 2013, OSM reached 1,000,000 registered users. From April 23, even unregistered users could leave “notes” on the openstreetmap.org map to report problems. On May 7, the new online editor iD, built around the concept of being “simple and friendly,” was embedded in the OSM homepage and became the default editor three months later; on December 2, the openstreetmap.org website was completely redesigned.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

On February 16, 2015, a routing feature was enabled on the openstreetmap.org website, and registered users reached 2,000,000 in spring 2015. On June 16, 2018, a moderation queue was added to the site so users could report spam directly to moderators and administrators; on November 8, 2018, registered users reached five million.⁠[1][1][1][1]

Since July 1, 2020, the “standard style” map on openstreetmap.org has been treated as a Produced Work under the ODbL (the map tiles were previously licensed under CC BY-SA), so screenshots of it must be attributed to OpenStreetMap. On July 4–5 of that year, State of the Map was held entirely online for the first time. On February 25, 2021, OSM’s total number of changesets reached 100 million.⁠[8][8][1][1]

On March 21, 2022, the OSM Community Forum was launched, and on May 1, OpenStreetMap hired its first employee.⁠[1][1]

On December 15, 2022, the Joint Development Foundation, an affiliate of the Linux Foundation, announced the formation of the Overture Maps Foundation, founded by Amazon Web Services (AWS), MetaMetaMeta (Meta Platforms, Inc.) is a publicly listed American technology company, renamed from Facebook in 2021, that operates social communication, digital advertising, virtual reality, smart glasses and artificial intelligence businesses.Open the full entry, Microsoft, and TomTom to develop interoperable open map data; the project said it would seek to integrate existing open map data from projects such as OpenStreetMap and city planning departments, along with new data contributed by members and built using computer vision and AI.⁠[9][9][9]

On January 19, 2023, OSM reached 10,000,000 registered users.⁠[1]

On December 19, 2024, the OSMF Board announced that Meta had contributed 178,710 euros for OSM operations and infrastructure and for community events around the world, with part of the funds already used to sponsor State of the Map in Nairobi and several regional events; Meta also stepped up to Platinum Corporate Membership. According to the OSMF, Meta’s editors have focused on detecting and fixing errors and vandalism, Meta develops the Rapid editor for human-in-the-loop AI-assisted mapping, and its Mapillary platform has provided street-level imagery for OSM for years.⁠[10][10][10][10][10]

On December 20, 2024, the OSMF announced that it had been selected by Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency for a two-year service agreement worth 384,000 euros to ensure the stability, growth, and modernization of OSM’s core software, including updating code to current standards and improving documentation and testing infrastructure, and that it would create two new roles as a result, the first being an OSM Core Software Development Facilitator.⁠[11][11][11]

On July 22, 2025, the OSMF announced the deployment of vector tiles on its servers and the publication of the layer on the OSM website. It had launched a vector tiles demo site in June 2024 and spent months testing reliability and speed; developers can use the OSMF-hosted vector tiles with styles based on the existing Shortbread styles or their own, subject to the Vector Tile Usage Policy.⁠[12][12][12][12][12]

On August 12, 2025, the number of nodes in the OSM database reached 10 billion; according to OSM Wiki statistics, as of the second quarter of 2025 there were about 10 million registered users and about 2.25 million different users who had contributed.⁠[13][13][13]

On June 6–7, 2026, OSMF board members Craig Allan (Chair), Dani Waltersdorfer Jimenez (Secretary), Roland Olbricht (Treasurer), Héctor Ochoa Ortiz, Laura Mugeha, and Maurizio Napolitano held a two-day face-to-face meeting at TomTom’s offices in Madrid to discuss priorities for the next 12 months, including a fundraising campaign, reviving the Communications Working Group, a new job posting, the OSMF’s move to the European Union, and the launch of an artificial intelligence policy.⁠[14][14][14][14]

On July 10, 2026, the OSMF said it was interested in taking part in EU-funded projects, arguing that OSM could make a practical contribution in areas such as digital commons and digital sovereignty. It stressed that it is a small foundation supporting a very large global community and does not create data on behalf of the community, and cautioned that because OSM data is published under the ODbL while EU open data is often published under licenses such as CC BY, license compatibility should be considered at the project design stage.⁠[15][15][15][15][15][15]

On August 21, 2026, the OSMF announced that Proton AG, having made two unsolicited donations totaling around 70,000 euros over the past two years and thereby exceeding the Platinum threshold, had been recognized as a Platinum Corporate Member; the OSMF said that while OSM is free to use, servers, infrastructure, and the people who maintain it cost money, most of which comes from corporate members.⁠[16][16][16][16]

On August 28–30, 2026, State of the Map 2026, OSM’s annual international conference organized by the OSMF, was held in Paris, France, and online over three days of talks, workshops, and discussions. The next conference, State of the Map 2027, is scheduled for July 2027 at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá.⁠[17][18][17][18][18]

OSM is built by a community of mappers who contribute and maintain data on roads, trails, cafés, railway stations, and much more around the world, with an emphasis on local knowledge; contributors use aerial imagery, GPS devices, and low-tech field maps to verify the data, and include enthusiast mappers, GIS professionals, engineers running the OSM servers, and humanitarians mapping disaster-affected areas. OSM also includes openly licensed data from national mapping agencies and other sources, while contributors are reminded never to add data from copyrighted sources such as Google Maps or printed maps without explicit permission from the copyright holders.⁠[19][19][19][20][20]

OSM data is licensed under the ODbL: anyone may copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt it as long as they credit OpenStreetMap and its contributors, and if they alter or build upon it, they may distribute the result only under the same license. Users of OSM data must display an attribution notice and make clear that the data is available under the ODbL, for example in the corner of a browsable map, which is why many web maps carry the notice “© OpenStreetMap contributors.” OSM documentation is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Although the data is open, the OSMF does not provide a free-of-charge map API or map tiles for third parties, and use of its API, tiles, and Nominatim is subject to the respective usage policies.⁠[20][20][20][20][19][20][20][21]

The OpenStreetMap Foundation is an international not-for-profit organization that supports, but does not control, the OpenStreetMap project, and it formally operates openstreetmap.org and many related services on behalf of the community. As a UK-registered company limited by guarantee, it acts as the legal entity for the project, hosts the servers and services the project needs, accepts and allocates donations for the project, organizes the annual State of the Map conference, and supports working groups such as communications and licensing. OpenStreetMap, the magnifying glass logo, and State of the Map are registered trademarks of the OSMF.⁠[22][19][23][23][23][19]

The OSMF’s members, drawn from around the world, elect its board of directors; board members are volunteers, and some also serve on working groups. Individual membership costs £15 a year and is free for active contributors; more than ten years ago the OSMF amended its constitution so that community members can join, vote, and support the foundation financially without providing personally identifying information such as a name or address. As of October 2026, the OSMF website listed Brazil Singh, Craig Allan, Daniela Waltersdorfer, Gregory Marler, Héctor Ochoa Ortiz, Maurizio Napolitano, and Roland Olbricht as board members, with the chair, secretary, and treasurer roles shown as pending.⁠[23][24][22][16][24][24][24][24][24][24][24][24][24]

OSM provides map data for thousands of websites, mobile apps, and hardware devices, and its users include humanitarian responders and some of the largest technology companies in the world; hosting is supported by Fastly, OSMF corporate members, and other partners. As of October 2026, the OSMF corporate members page listed Platinum members including Esri, Meta, Microsoft, Proton, TomTom, and FLOSS/fund; Gold members Grab, Komoot, and Mapbox; and Silver members including Bolt, GraphHopper, Geofabrik, Elastic, QGIS, and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT); corporate membership starts at 750 euros a year.⁠[19][16][19][25][25][25][25][25][25][25][25]

As of October 22, 2026, openstreetmap.org statistics showed about 10.96 million registered users, about 10.96 billion nodes, about 1.23 billion ways, and about 14.99 million relations in the database, and about 32.15 billion uploaded GPS points.⁠[26]

OpenStreetMap: Official website: https://www.openstreetmap.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[19]

OpenStreetMap Foundation: Official website: https://osmfoundation.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[22]

OpenStreetMap Wiki: Official website: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]