mobility-data-specification VS countries-states-cities-database

I haven't heard of direct antagonism as such, but I do know there've been social media groups dedicated to defacing/destroying property, incl hacking/theft. Unless maybe you're one of the top 2-3, I don't think anyone has time (in eng at least) to do such things. From what I could tell, everyone does use custom software.

To your point about ISP competition, the original company in the space I was at was developing generic operations software. Our main (large) client decided to inhouse instead of continue the contract, and a smaller competitor bought us. Sharing platforms isn't really in the cards; the best you'll get is MDS[0] or GBFS[1], but those initiatives are typically led by municipalities or their vendors. The former is usually restricted to regulators, and the latter isn't always reliably implemented unless the market specifies it. These are also moving specs (markets want different versions, ofc), it was great fun!

As far as "winning" vs other motivations, remember that (afaik) none of these companies are profitable yet and the VCs aren't dong this for fun. The people I worked with cared very much about the mission, but the board doesn't always agree.

[0] https://github.com/openmobilityfoundation/mobility-data-spec...

[1] https://gbfs.mobilitydata.org/

At $WORK I created a prototype that used https://github.com/dr5hn/countries-states-cities-database for a city/state/country typeahead widget - it was generally ok, loaded data into a read-only sqlite db that was created at container build time. We shipped it to AWS for the demo. There are some data bugs, cities in Turkey and Geneva were the top reported issues. You get what you pay for I suppose. Have not seen Geonames before this post but agree the username vs some form of api key/auth is weird.

This looks promising.. https://github.com/dr5hn/countries-states-cities-database

Depending on what you need from this package, this might be of help https://github.com/dr5hn/countries-states-cities-database

Link

The latter one, though, says that it got its data from countries-states-cities-database, which has some json files with the countries, states and cities. The cities json file is huge. I really don't think that I would ever use all of them, I would only need data from North and South America, at most.