jlivni

The short answer is that the licensing of the OpenStreetMap data is incompatible with the licensing of the data we use.

However we're definitely supporters of the project. We’ve contributed money directly to OSM and to the Humanitarian Open Street Map project, and every summer we've sponsored Google Summer of Code interns to work on it (for example just next week some OpenStreetMap participants will be on our campus as part of our sponsorship of the project for Google Summer of Code 2011).

We do allow caching for performance purposes, and you can and should cache our references, which you can use to get the latest info from the API.

We've also placed some restrictions initially on the API as we've launched it to figure out how people are using it. If you can provide additional details on your use needs for the project that would be great.

One goal of the caching terms and restrictions is to allow you to cache a limited set of place data locally so that you can ensure your application is responsive, but also to ensure nobody bulk downloads a huge amount of place data, or uses the data outside of a Maps API application.

Although I don’t have all the details of your app, your use case for caching sounds quite reasonable for our API. However this question was asked during our Google I/O Fireside Chat earlier this year, and here's a link to that video which has some details that will hopefully clarify this for you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qo8g4x2OkPs#t=29m30s.

Putting together what you see at http://maps.google.com is the work of a lot of different teams, and people on these teams have an awesomely wide variety of backgrounds. Overall the percentage of people working on Geo with a “classic GIS” background is probably not that large, but some of us (myself included) have spent many years working with proprietary and open source GIS software before joining Google.