I agree, but the more important thing that this article needs to emphasize is the difference between crowdsourcing and crowdserfing. Waze is using the crowd to hoard data about traffic, that you can use for one specific purpose (avoiding traffic) but for science its nearly useless. Want to understand traffic accidents based on the design of highways? you're out of luck with Waze data. All that the crowd is doing is making Google rich.

We definitely need open source software to power these platforms. But whats more important is to keep the work of the crowd in the open. But maintaining data servers, reliable access and developing features takes developers and time -- how was fund that work? that is the real challenge.