I think that the main bottlenecks for a competing geocode system is being open-source, simple to understand, and having an available API to start off quickly.

I think that the main bottlenecks for a competing geocode system is being open-source, simple to understand, and having an available API to start off quickly. Geohash [1] is public-domain, features variable-precision encoding of coordinates, and can speed up some computational processes like neighbor-finding and proximity searches, so I think it ticks a lot of boxes. Throw in a NATO-alphabet style in order to transform to words, and voila! If anyone wants to play around I have built a ready-to-use API for Geohash [2] that is and will remain free [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash [2] http://geohash.world/ http://geohash.world/