I recently read at Developers up in arms about price hikes that they are now charging everyone to use their Google maps product. The only way around it is to create a nonprofit and apply for a grant. This will have grave implications on social conscious and personal developers alike.
I wanted to create a mapping application to help social advocacy groups and others and I was going to use Googlemaps to implement it, but now I’m not so sure. I may go with Openlayers and OpenStreetmap for this project instead or I may do it in Google Maps anyhow for proof of concept. I will keep researching until I find a solution that works.