As I heard from CloudMade top-guys, great battle between Google, Microsoft, ESRI and some other cartography companies begins. There are MapQuest, Yahoo among others. These companies will invest a lot of money in map and mobile services in the nearest future. Hence they have decided to hire a lot of GIS professionals. As OpenStreetMap is one of the best GIS-related community, they are interested in many of us.
What I know for sure is Steve Coast was proposed to lead one of the Google Map Maker department.
Meanwhile other companies wants to hire as many OSM people as they can, so Andy Allan, Richard Fairhurst, Frederik Ramm and Simone Cortesi already has propositions.

Please Steve, if you read this, remember all these minutes you've spent for OSM, remember people you've worked with and make the right decision. You are the face of this project and we will do miss you.

Please everybody, retweet it.