We were careful to make sure the emphasis was on the non-restrictive license on uses of the data. This isn't claiming to be a "open places database" but maybe that can exist with this data as the backbone.

We are interested in doing a dump, but have some things to overcome first. Beyond that, this isn't just promoting our API. To be clear, we were only clarifying the license of the data with a blog post since there wasn't a clear license before. The community has turned this into a bigger deal, so this is by no means a self-promotion thing on our end.