rmc

Silly question, if Scotland got independence, what would the name of the new country be? Scotland? Kingdom of Scotland? Republic of Scotland (bit controversial I suppose).

What would the name of the (now reduced) UK be? Still "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland"? "United Kingdom of England, Wales and Northern Ireland?". Have these little niggly details be sorted out?

I don't know about the history of post codes in Ireland. I'd be surprised if it was more than the local post monopoly or postal union dictating the scheme by fiat?

Irish person here. I don't think the national postal company (An Post) were in favour of postcodes in Ireland, because they already knew where all the addresses were. Postcodes will help non postal uses like couriers.

One problem with Irish Postcodes is due to politicians deciding on the politically easy thing, like not forcing people to change town/Street name

And osmand

Well, the goal of many "open licences" is to ensure that if someone builds on it, that they have to share back. This is to increase the amount of open data in the world. Many people spend lots of their own free time volunteering to improve OSM, and some are annoyed if a company can just swoop in, use what people have volunteered, and yet not volunteer anything back.

In short: If you want to benefit from what other people are giving away for free, why don't you want to share things back yourself? Why all the take and no give?

In practice, someone will buy/rent a dataset from someone else, and they won't have the rights to release that original dataset out in the open, so they can't release it in the open. But they still want to use the great OSM data source. In this case, the original dataset is the one that infects their whole database, by not allowing it to be opened.

OSM doesn't try for high accuracy. Accuracy to 5 meters is still very useful.