Openlayers commericial application: licensing issues?

Question

I am planning on creating a commercial fleet/asset tracking web app, but got discouraged when I found our about the high price Google and Microsoft charge to use their services in a commercial setting. I found Openlayers, and it claims to be free, so I am wondering if anyone has had experience using it commercially?

I looks like the use of the API is free, but does that include the maps as well? Openlayers also lets you use Google as the mapping provider, but if I do that, would I be breaking Google's TOS since it is commercial?

I apologize if this isn't the correct place to ask such a question as it isn't directly related to a programming problem, but I can't find a definitive answer anywhere else and I imagine someone on SO has had experience creating a commercial mapping application.

Answer 1

OpenLayers has no data - it is an opensource mapping API that can be used with many different data sources.

To be free of all data licensing concerns use OSM data rather than Google - http://www.openstreetmap.org/ with OpenLayers. See some examples at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenLayers#Examples