To provide an open alternative to Google Maps' proprietary data seems pretty holy to me.
The author's choice of title is odd given he acknowledges its public benefit too:
"It’s the opposite of the Tragedy of the Commons — all of the private property holders, acting in their own self interest, are enriching the common resource rather than depleting it."
Man, this is a bad take. It makes passing mention of Google, ignoring the herd of elephants in the room. Google effectively did a bunch of dumping for years to grab market share, and the second they felt like they had it locked up they started turning the screws. No mention of that. I honestly can't tell if this is astroturfing or if the author is oblivious.
A bunch of companies contributing to a shared maps service is about as scary as a bunch of companies contributing to the linux kernel.
Pretty likely that the reason OSM is getting all this attention is because Google opened themselves to competition when they started (rationally) price gouging like there wasn't any.
Reacting just to the title, one of the reasons I admire some of those big evil tech companies is because they appear to compete really hard against each other, and mostly by creating new stuff.
That compares very favorable with eg. the banks or telecoms in my country (and many others).
