Wow. That is really cheap for licensing.
Grab is just one of the corporate contributors of OpenStreetMap, Grab’s “own map” is not theirs, it’s ours, “OpenStreetMap contributors” is the copyright holder, and copyright managed by the OpenStreetMap Foundation.
Grab is a Gold corporate member of the foundation, it means it pays EUR 15000 annually. You can see other corporate members here.
The license of the data is called ODbL, they call it open source in the article, but software licenses don’t work well outside the software world, it’s a database license. ODbL has one requirement: If you display the map, or any extracted data, you have to display the attribution text, which reads “© OpenStreetMap”. In the article there is a map, and they don’t display this attribution, so this article does not comply with the license of the map it tries to advertise…
This whole article sounds like an ad for Grab. More technological info about how Grab employees contribute to the map on the OSM wiki: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Grab
I had traveled to Southeast Asia recently, and used Grab for the first time there to get a taxi. I was surprised by how precise it was. No wonder.
Grab works great. I remember when they killed Uber in the region. They had the option for cash payment and cash on delivery when Uber was trying to apply it’s 1st world western logic of “everyone has a credit card” and failed because that was just plain wrong.