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I'll forever be mad that my country (Ireland) hired some firm to create eircode, which is a proprietary geo system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_addresses_in_the_Republ...

You can't discern the eircode for a given address, as far as I am aware, without looking it up, and lookups are limited to 10 by paywall.

We paid 27m euro for what has already been solved by open source, and for some reason we have to continue to pay for it.

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If you enter the address in to google maps it will give you the eircode. The issue in Ireland is the non unique addresses in rural areas. The fact that the last 4 characters are randomly distributed means that a sequence for addresses on the same street is not something you can derive. You need to look up each in turn.

Ireland's non unique addresses aren't a problem for any of the open standards around this I've seen. Eircode is unnecessary. Using one of these geo location centric systems also means no central system is required to add new ones etc.

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