As an infrequent poster to osm-talk I think I'm excluded from Colin's "3 or 4 people" and "most active participants" and am not in the Fetted Inner Core (at least I wasn't the last time I checked!) - however my views are similar to the ones previously, in this case, very sorry Colin! :-)
In short, What Three Words does initially appear to be a "wow that's cool" techy project, but given closer inspection it's not that suitable for an open data project. It is not open or ground verifiable *at the moment*. Yes it has got recently millions in funding. I frankly would expect more public pressure to get it used in OSM than there has been. Perhaps they are avoiding direct pressure until their board demands it, or perhaps they are approaching the Foundation obliquely. I do know that they have been doing a lot of work promoting the service to development and humanitarian organisations, and they really are good at promoting their product. Very many good quality proprietary data and software for profit companies make healthy profits from working in the development and humanitarian industries. One could think that such good causes should be the preserve of Libre Software and non profit organizations, but that's a fallacy. Anyhow I'm digressing, sorry! So, if my local shops start to use it in the future, if "people on the ground" use it, then I would say it could be added then - but there's no benefit to mappers, or people on the ground for adding it before that stage. At that stage, before people actually use it, it's just another way of encoding location, and therefore redundant. Futhermore in both cases, the only way for another mapper to tell if the reference is correct is to use the third party API. Given their approach and closedness however, I very much doubt that most people will start using it. Perhaps they will buy into getting a developing country to use it nationally, but we will have to see what happens. So, in the future, if normal folks use it on the ground, it may be useful to add it, in my humble opinion. Perhaps they will open source their algorithm but keep their APIs and services closed, again we will have to see. Perhaps *if and when it is used by people on the ground* we can pressure the company to open up enough of their solution to make it OSM friendly and for them to still please their board of investors? But the main reason I don't see it being used in OSM is that it goes against the spirit of the project. This spirit of openness, collaborativeness and Libre software. It's closed, it doesn't look like it will ever be open and it ties the usage of the system through a closed API. It's a closed data project, and OSM is *the* open data project. Cheers, Tim
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