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Top-level
@jonty An acquaintance of mine designed and built a comparable system to W3W - what3fucks. It worked well and, as you might imagine, was built on a dictionary of profanity. The W3W sent their lawyers into no-sense-of-humour mode. W3W is proprietary. Which is fine. What's *not* cool is when a government adopts that proprietary system for addressing and so it's locked up in so many ways. 4 comments
@mtmail @jonty Yeah, postal codes, particularly the fine-grained ones like ZIP+4 in USA, UK postal codes, Saudi short address, Israel's 7-digit, etc, etc, etc, are often bound up with intellectual property rights. (At least in England, Scotland & Wales there's CodePoint Open, sorry NI, SoL.) Re EIRCODES, I'll just leave it to this thread from the Other Place. Check the replies, too. https://twitter.com/PDverse/status/1280981313550454789?t=otmeGWv7uGypRpkk3ats3Q&s=19 @mtmail @jonty The key difference is that if the government pays to develop a fine-grained postal code system, albeit implemented by a privatised post office or, in the case of Ireland, by Capita, then there's usually some light at the end of the tunnel that the data might be made open on some way, medium term (cf. CodePoint Open). If you relinquish to W3W you are inextricably linked to a global-scale system run by a foreign company - until their patent runs out. @mtmail @jonty Apparently, at least the following are in the W3W web: Kiribati According to Wikipedia, W3W has been losing tens of millions every year. Idea for philanthropist: buy them up, wind up the company and free the patent. |
Gregory's Server
@marcusjenkins @jonty Looking at you Ireland and our Eircodes!