Liquid Media

A very extensive 3 page article on OSM, comparison with commercial competitors and also challenges for success:

[...] Created in 2004 with the idea to build a free, worldwide digital map, OSM is now over 130,000 participants (they were 100,000 in March) with an accelerating growth.

As a result, the map database produced by the community is growing at a fast pace. In May there was over 33 million kilometers of roads in the database. European capitals such as Berlin, Amsterdam, London and many others have been mapped to a level of details that is in many place far superior to Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ. As an example, a few months ago some German volunteers mapped the Berlin Zoo to a unique level of details, quickly followed by the Amsterdam Zoo from Dutch volunteers stimulated by the German example. [...]

via OpenStreetMap: the free map data revolution?.