Brion,
Thanks for this summary, and for the work involved in making the switch.
I wanted to mention that Mapquest provides a definition of heavy usage at the bottom of this page:
Specifically, they mention 4000 tiles per second.
Recently aude contacted Mapquest to give a kind of forewarning. She has had a longstanding relationship with Mapquest. They recently replied and we are ok for now (considering our traffic will likely start small and increase over time). Currently, we are seeing about 20,000 requests per day on GeoNames from both apps.
20k requests per day -> about 0.2 requests per second. Throw in four tiles for the initial map, and we're somewhere around 1 tile per second avg. We'll need a 4-thousandfold increase in usage to get near it I think. :)
Which would be, well, pretty cool. ;)
In addition, our legal department is in the process of reviewing Mapquest legalese, but on a first impression, it seems ok. The main concern is about how the user is warned on the phone regarding location info, and secondarily the privacy policy. This afternoon there will be a formal review and I will write an update then.
Have we done the same about Geonames?
-- brion