I mostly agree with the OP's gripes, but at the same time acknowledge that some form of projection from decimal degree coordinates to an equivalent tokenized form, whether it be 3 words or something else, can be useful. For instance, in some places in Dubai (my family have recently moved there) there are simply no street addresses. Directions are very much like "down the hill, to the right, near the clump of trees, 50m onwards and near the green bin outside the iron gates opposite the ditch". Clearly this sort of arrangement could benefit from some sort of simplified/tokenized geocoding of a location for addressing purposes - but yes, again I don't think W3W is particularly useful or clever for that matter. Conceptually at a high level it's intentions seem good, but the way it's implemented is not particularly useful - to my mind anyway. Promoting it as something useful to emergency services... uhm... no. Location of fire hydrants or trees or something, or just a rough address of a property - yes perhaps. But it should not be so guarded and shrouded in proprietary secrecy - as the OP says, if it's of any use, open source it. Stop this possessive behavior and attitude of "I've reinvented the world and it's mine mine mine"...