Comment They already make money out of OSM (Score 2, Interesting) 304
There are plenty of commercial uses of OSM already, and some are making quite enough money out of it. One that I personally use is offmaps.com, but that's obviously barely the tip of the iceberg.
But the question is whether OSM can make money out of it or not. Considering CloudMade are paying 40 employees, I guess they *do* can make money out of it, by "providing APIs for web sites, applications, and devices to use the rendered map data." (source is Wikipedia, probably the CloudMade website would provide more details.)
OSM is an example of success: open geospatial data and business profit.