This is exceedingly useful for so many use cases.
E.g. internal tools that display locations of assets, system statuses, webpages that display store locations, and so forth.
Plenty of use cases where the costs for Googles APIs would exceed the dev costs for implementing something like this.
Why isn't my time zone highlighted on the world map?
> In early 1995, a border war broke out between Peru and Ecuador and the Peruvian government complained to Microsoft that the border was incorrectly placed. Of course, if we complied and moved the border northward, we’d get an equally angry letter from the Ecuadorian government demanding that we move it back. So we removed the feature altogether.
> The time zone map met a similar fate. The Indian government threatened to ban all Microsoft software from the country because we assigned a disputed region to Pakistan in the time zone map. (Any map that depicts an unfavorable border must bear a government stamp warning the end-user that the borders are incorrect. You can’t stamp software.) We had to make a special version of Windows 95 for them.
— https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42...
The Protomaps project encompasses the generation of basemap PMTiles and the ecosystem for delivering them to clients. It supplies a standard daily build from OpenStreetMap, and since the generation is open source it can be customized to conform with your specific requirements.
Manipulation can and does happen with non open source data. Just ask any politician. You should be thankful to developers who did a great service for free. If something is incorrect because of conflicts - the world will sort it out eventually. It is not developers job.
PS - I did not downvoted as I never downvote any posts.
Sounds like a good policy.
Pray tell, which official map boundaries should be used?
The whole problem being that officials disagree of course.