Hi Ragi! My complaint with What3Words is 85% their proprietary business model. They are literally trying to convince less developed countries to adopt their sys

Hi Ragi! My complaint with What3Words is 85% their proprietary business model. They are literally trying to convince less developed countries to adopt their system in lieu of developing their own addressing systems. So that What3Words can forever force that country and anyone sending mail to it to pay them fees. It is evil. This is not theoretical; back in 2017 they were bragging at how they'd convinced the nations of Kiribati, Mongolia, Sint-Maarten, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Tonga, Nigeria and the Solomon Islands to use them as a national standard. I'm certain that the actual usage is exaggerated on their part but imagine if it were really true. Addressing is far too important to be held by a proprietary company. Addressing is a national service that countries should provide as part of being a nation, and there's a long history of countries developing addressing systems that does not rely on some predatory intellectual property system. 5% of my annoyance is What3Words pretends like they invented some brilliant new idea that's unique and should be IP protected. No, the idea is older than them. And the implementation is obvious to anyone with ordinary skill in the art of addressing. Anyone competent with GIS concepts can design a similar system in a few days' work. And there are many better alternatives. The other 10% of my complaint is their static addressing model. It's not good that two houses nearby have completely different addresses; real addressing always has hierarchical names and there's a reason for that. There's also a problem using words in that they are localized to the country's language. That's better than forcing English everywhere but makes interoperability way more confusing. Finally there's all the problems people keep finding with their word lists; that's covered well by other writers so I won't go into it. PS: I misspoke when I said Geohash is the oldest similar system. MGRS dates to the 1940s. There may be older ones, too.