Branden, Sorry mate but I think you fail to understand the difference between proprietary underlying infrastructure vs proprietary data. Sure, Oracle is proprietary software, but the data you put into the database isn't, and you can extract that data any time you want. Latitude and longitude, and other systems are based on published standards, and the codes representing locations and your right to use them can't just vanish, but if w3w went bust, their mapping between locations and code simply ceases to exist.