I cannot find any resources other than: OsmAnd is GPLv2, the API is MIT. I cannot find anything about the plugins, but that would only mean that the plugins are a mix of open and closed source, though the app itself is still open source.

standing to their documentation they have an exception to the GPLv2 for the Google Play app to be able (my guess here) to better process payments and such.

So to my admittedly poor understanding:

OsmAnd -> open source
OsmAnd on Google Play -> closed source but compiled from the FOSS code
Plugins -> YMMV depending on the plugin

Yet because OsmAnd and it’s API itself are FOSS I would argue that this is still the right community for the OP question. :)

the paid version is still Free and Open source. In this case free stands for Free as in Free speech and not as in Free beer.

Also none of the Free or Open source licences prevent you to sell the compiled software. Hell, most of the Open source licences don’t even prevent you to close the source code (Mozilla, MIT, etc.) it’s only the GPL and a few others that mandate that the source code must be made available on request…

Tracking stuff came as soon as you could communicate asynchronously with a server, really. It became widely known and a plague in the 10s but it started as soon as Ajax was available. Keep in mind that Google and most of the websites were free and ads driven almost from the start because that was the only way to create a critical mass of users.

True but since then Israel has done nigh to nothing to stop the creation of kibbutz in Palestine, and the occupation of land both in Gaza and in the West Bank, and Hamas has grown to pretty much erase any other political faction in Palestine. The PLO shrunk out of any international relevance since the death of Arafat and Israel is actually governed by the far-right. Alas! Everything went very wrong since the 90s.

Now, I am in no way expert in the subtleties of the political situation in Israel and Palestine, but it seems that the peace process in that region will always be doomed to fail.

Since Israel was founded there never had been a chance of a happy outcome. The claim on the land was tenuous at best then and neither Israel nor Palestine ever wanted to peacefully mingle. The fact that Israel is governed by far right religious nuts and Palestine by terrorists also adds to the problem, but hey! whatever works to assuage the “western world” guilt for the Shoah, right?

I buy books, most of the times I read them. ebooks have been my salvation space wise, project Gutenberg saved me money wise, at least for the classics.

I think that the start was a PCMCIA or PC Card.