Just curious what the official policy from Garmin is regarding non-garmin made maps?
would it be worthwhile asking them to assist with OSM maps for Garmin devices?
or do you think they will rule this as a competition for there own maps?
Personally I would have thought with the free Google maps they could gain something if they provided a set of updated maps from OSM (for free of course)
any opinions or insight?
It doesn’t look like Google is permitting map uploads, more likely just POI. Google just says it uploads to Nuvi’s and Street Pilots, which would provide their own routing. Also, the price of City Navigator US and Canada is down to about $55 US. With the quality of the road data available for free in the US (Tiger Shapefiles) I wouldn’t touch it if I were Garmin. Also, if the maps aren’t compiled with their compiler, they’d run some liablity if they approved them. Check out the ReadMe file that comes with cgpsmapper. In it the author says that he has never seen a spec for Garmin’s compiler, has reverse engineered cgpsmapper, and, if it crashes your GPS, too bad.
Still, Garmin’s probably sold a few units to OSM users, so maybe they’d see some incentive there.
Don’t know the official policy, but selling maps is a big source of income for Garmin so high quality maps for free are probably not something Garmin is waiting for. However, there are a lot of people who buy Garmin just because it has free maps and those people might consider buying a commercial map someday as well… So I can imagine that Garmin will neither encourage free map making, but also won’t actively work against it…