Marc Hedlund, Chief Product Officer, Wesabe mentioned a couple of sites with openness in mind. He talked about the fact that many of the map companies purchase that data from other companies. Thus, the need for open data repositories. Here are a few that he talked about:
Openmapconent.org
wikipedia
www.wesabe.com
openip.info
Stewart Butterfield, General Manager, Flickr, Yahoo! Inc. – A competitor requested a key from flickr. Initial response from flickr was “screw you.” After speaking with their team they changed their mind and decided to be open because the value is in what flickr provides and the users should be able to chose what they do with their data.