I think a more accurate description is "Open Source Lat/Long Alternative". Addresses, at least in my part of the world, work relatively well for telling a person where you are, given some knowledge of the town.
I can tell someone "College between Drake and Prospect" and they can picture it in their head. Sure, it requires some level of knowledge of the town, but no level of knowledge of the town is going to make "HW8C+FH" something that someone can picture. They're going to have to plug it into their phone.
I work in real estate, and this doesn't really solve anything for our system either. These codes don't solve our address problems (of which there are many). It doesn't solve parcel identification. Not really sure what it does solve other than shorter lat/long.
Unfortunately we're conflated addresses with coordinates, but fundamentally addresses are not geo-coordinates. Addresses are really just an ancient (500+ years!) short-hand for giving a person a set of rough directions to a "place", with the person supplying that last mile of figuring from context exactly where they are going. It is impressive how far we've taken this technology, but it is really starting to falter as the information age has matured.
From my perspective any solution, like this one, that tries to solve the problem of addresses through the lens of coordinates is doomed to failure. The reason is that there are just too many use cases that raw coordinates cannot supply context for.
For example when I ask for directions to a restaurant, the context of who I am and what my relation to the restaurant is matters quite a lot. A set of coordinates handed out uniformly to all who ask does nothing for my particular use case. Plumbers, health inspectors, and delivery drivers don't use the same entrance, or parking, as ride share or pedestrians.
I think it would be more productive to move to a system that is capable of capturing and relaying these kinds of relations, or at least taking as them as input. Better geo-coordinates miss the forest for the trees.
Just wanted to express thanks for this very insightful comment. The range of solutions visible in other posts must be ridiculously amusing (being absolute, global, western-centric, experience and culture-denying, and having properties irrelevant to local inhabitants) to anthropologists.
I can tell someone "College between Drake and Prospect" and they can picture it in their head. Sure, it requires some level of knowledge of the town, but no level of knowledge of the town is going to make "HW8C+FH" something that someone can picture. They're going to have to plug it into their phone.
I work in real estate, and this doesn't really solve anything for our system either. These codes don't solve our address problems (of which there are many). It doesn't solve parcel identification. Not really sure what it does solve other than shorter lat/long.