It is hoped that this project, and the OpenStreetMap project in general, will force a sea change in the ownership of geographical data in the UK, much in the way that the Sanger Institute's human-genome sequencing effort in Cambridge made it unfeasible for Celera Genomics to exercise proprietary control over the human genome.
And Australia would be a lot more work to map using volunteers and GPS units. (Hmm.. perhaps you could use British backpackers to do the job, in between picking grapes?)
Unless, of course, doing so would violate some kind of national-security law. Which wouldn't surprise me.
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Thu May 4 16:25:32 2006
Of course, we did the same thing here in Ozlandia with all our GIS data over a decade ago, flogging it off on the cheap to a private company and then having to license it back to use it again. I remember creating one map one week and then having to order the rights to use it even though the shape files were still sitting on our server. Of course, the money the company paid us (the Australian people) was a pittance of what it cost to produce them, much the same as selling off Telstra was a bargain for the media moguls who were only ever really interested in all that tasty infrastructure that for some reason no theoretically more efficient private enterprise was able to create.