Vodafone Gives Away Its $30 Million Wayfinder As Open Source
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Two years after it bought Wayfinder for 230 million Swedish crowns (now $31 million) to power its location services, Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) is now giving it away - it’s making almost all Wayfinder code available via open source.
“Given our decision to stop developing turn by turn location based services as part of our core business, it seemed an obvious choice to make the code we own open source,” Voda’s internet director Pieter Knook, who led the original acquisition says in the announcement. “We look forward to seeing its continued use in all sorts of different applications in the future.”
Vodafone once had ambitions to use Wayfinder to underpin location-based advertising and power its GPS navigation.
But things have got complicated since then - Google’s free turn-by-turn navigation through Android forced Nokia (NYSE: NOK) to make its equivalent service free, and Vodafone followed suit, saying in March it would shut Wayfinder.
Third-party developers are the beneficiaries. Wayfinder code is being made available via GitHub under a BSD license, including the back-end server, map software, and clients for Android, iPhone and S60.
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