This is because everything is in digital form. Essentially all government systems are digital-first, and for the citizen, often digital-only. If the data is lost, there may be no paper records to restore everything from land registry, business registry (operating agreements, ownership records), etc.
Without an out-of-country backup, a reversion to previous statuses means the country is lost (Estonia has been occupied a lot). With it, much of the government can continue to function, as an expat government until freedom and independence is restored.
Definitely drop us a line. Our v2 response structure is still undergoing some iteration, especially around the particulars of labeling, so this may be intended (depending on the specific query), but we can certainly look into it to confirm that.
For a good geocoder, you need many other data sources (which can be open). OpenAddresses (https://openaddresses.io/) is an example of a vital dataset to delivering anything of any quality.
Returning real results requires extensive parsing and awareness of addresses and place data (including localization of them), and this is not something you get for free based on OSM data.
It was originally based on Pelias, but we've since augmented with additional data sources (such as Foursquare OS Places) and significantly improved the baseline for performance and accuracy.
The green card system is already broken (this is pretty universally agreed). The notion that receiving a degree in the US—which often entails a large degree of cultural assimilation—doesn't give you a strong argument for being able to stay if you can find a job is archaic.
It's not like large tech companies don't know how to employee people in other countries, so I doubt this is going to impact hiring rates of foreign US-graduates, but rather keep more talent in the US (good for the US) and should have little to no effect on wages (again, if a tech company wants to hire them, they'll just hire them at a foreign office where they can obtain a working permit).
My company may be able to help save you the trouble of self-hosting. We do have a free tier (for non-commercial / test usage), and our pricing structure allows you to save quite a bit compared to MapTiler.
Isn't this a bit like saying we're still in Google's world because most maps still use Web Mercator? :)
Good tech builds on what came before. Mapbox did a lot of ground-breaking work in building tooling around OSM, but so have many others. The fact that they named it Mapbox Vector Tiles is genius in hindsight, because even though we may use tons of tooling they didn't create to build and render them, their name is still there.
> The next challenge is to evolve the tech stack to something beyond what Mapbox worked up five/ten years ago.
Agreed, and I think we've seen a lot of iterative work in the open since then. The next challenge is likely building a OSS stack to do proper 3D: open data (including OSM) to pixels, and that work is already beginning across a lot of organizations: https://github.com/nyurik/future-mvt/discussions, Overture Maps, MapLibre, etc.
I discovered it while looking at raster solutions, and it is pretty great! The raster stack is pretty bonkers. TiTiler uses at least three fundamental layers: GDAL, RasterIO, and rio-tiler. Each contribute a fairly significant improvement (for the use-case) over the underlying one.
Without an out-of-country backup, a reversion to previous statuses means the country is lost (Estonia has been occupied a lot). With it, much of the government can continue to function, as an expat government until freedom and independence is restored.