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Mapbox-gl-js is no longer under the 3-Clause BSD license

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Re: Mapbox-gl-js is no longer under the 3-Clause BSD license

#181
post #136
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to see this. I’m a long time mapbox gl js user for https://onthegomap.com which costs $300-400 per month for running my own graphhopper routing servers and Stadia Maps tile hosting. It would cost over $3000 per month to upgrade to 2.0 and I have no need for 3D. I also use mapbox gl js for visualizing large datasets locally (precomoute vector tiles from non-geographic datasets), which doesn’t seems like it needs…

side question: who are you using for satellite imagery? I see them being served from ArcGIS but can't find a tile service offering from them.

Yes, ArcGIS World Imagery https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=10df2279f9684e4a9f6... - from everything I can gather in their docs and talking with sales reps, it is fine to use with proper attribution, which took a bit of work to update dynamically as you pan to different regions.

Re: Mapbox-gl-js is no longer under the 3-Clause BSD license

#182
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any plans for monetization you can share? $300-400 per month seems an expensive gift to the public ...

The site shows google ads when the screen is big enough, luckily that covers the monthly hosting costs. Would definitely like to find a value-adding (rather than reducing) way to cover the costs though. I've been thinking about adding an account system where you can save a couple routes for free and unlimited with a subscription, along with other "premium" features, but haven't finalized anything yet. Definitely open…

I've found Patreon works well for my site (cycle.travel).

Re: Mapbox-gl-js is no longer under the 3-Clause BSD license

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not only GL JS. If Mapbox wants to keep investing heavily in open source why is it that 3 bigger mapbox libraries have a commercial license after it was open source a while ago? (mapbox navigation android & mapbox GL Native)

Speculating (remember that I'm just an engineer and not in charge of business decisions), but perhaps because Mapbox tried really hard to build a business on server-side services alone while gifting most of its innovations to the world, and after a decade of enormous effort, keeping the client of such enormous complexity fully open source appears to be unsustainable? Would you rather see Mapbox getting eaten by big t…

> ould you rather see Mapbox getting eaten by big tech corporations and ceasing to exist?

With move like this, what's the difference?

(Yes, I do share anonfornoreason's sentinent in the sibling comment.)

Re: Mapbox-gl-js is no longer under the 3-Clause BSD license

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speculating (remember that I'm just an engineer and not in charge of business decisions), but perhaps because Mapbox tried really hard to build a business on server-side services alone while gifting most of its innovations to the world, and after a decade of enormous effort, keeping the client of such enormous complexity fully open source appears to be unsustainable? Would you rather see Mapbox getting eaten by big t…

> ould you rather see Mapbox getting eaten by big tech corporations and ceasing to exist? With move like this, what's the difference? (Yes, I do share anonfornoreason's sentinent in the sibling comment.)

There may be no difference for you with this level of vitriol, but there's a difference for hundreds of people who have jobs, and for dozens of engineers like me who will keep contributing to open source significantly at work hours.

Re: Mapbox-gl-js is no longer under the 3-Clause BSD license

#185
We're working on a community-driven fork of mapbox-gl-js here: https://github.com/maps-gl/maps-gl

Our initial primary goal is to avoid fragmentation, and thereby support a healthy OSGeo community.

Updating from mapbox-gl-js should be pretty smooth, I just pushed the first batch of release builds to npm for what will become maps-gl@1.13.0: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@maps-gl/maps-gl

Re: Mapbox-gl-js is no longer under the 3-Clause BSD license

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try us out at Geocode Earth! ( https://geocode.earth ) We wrote and maintain the open-source Pelias geocoder( https://github.com/pelias/pelias ) at Mapzen and have been continuing to improve it in the 3 years since Mapzen's shutdown. Geocode Earth is our hosted service built around Pelias so you can get started quickly, not worry about keeping data up to date, or doing all the fine tuning and optimization that we've…

Nice - tested a bunch of the ones we were benchmarking against and they all worked well! We will keep you in mind as our usage grows or if we have another project. Your tiered pricing doesn't make sense for us as we launch.

Great, glad they worked!

Thanks for the good feedback on our pricing. We plan to roll out pay-as-you-go pricing in 2021 that should help with that. In the meantime feel free to reach out to us at hello@geocode.earth and we can set you up with a smaller plan to get you started, if you'd like.

Re: Mapbox-gl-js is no longer under the 3-Clause BSD license

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ould you rather see Mapbox getting eaten by big tech corporations and ceasing to exist? With move like this, what's the difference? (Yes, I do share anonfornoreason's sentinent in the sibling comment.)

There may be no difference for you with this level of vitriol, but there's a difference for hundreds of people who have jobs, and for dozens of engineers like me who will keep contributing to open source significantly at work hours.

The point was, that it is no longer open source, when ToS acceptance with rights of audit is needed.

It's no different to the likes of Oracle. Oracle also employs hundreds of people.

But hey, if you think everyone who criticizes it is full of vitriol, I don't think any further discussion is needed.

Re: Mapbox-gl-js is no longer under the 3-Clause BSD license

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks Peter for calling this out. It's unfortunate that many businesses made the decision to work with mapbox-native and mapbox-gl-js based off the premise they could self-host and save money. It definitely feels like a bad bait and switch, and right after it gained market dominance too. Bad taste in my mouth for Mapbox products now, though clearly this is just whining because they will be successful with this chang…

I wouldn't be working for Mapbox if it actually were a villainous company with an evil plan to "bait and switch" with open source, or undercut all these small competing businesses just out of spite, and it's easy to succumb to these simplistic conspiracies in the heat of the moment, but I do hope these sentiments will be short-lived.

“Oh look here’s an unattended purse, I need the money so I’ll just take it. They left it here anyway”

Introducing a drastic billing change under the implied threat that your year or more of man hours performed using an underlying open source library with an understandable billing model is now potentially at risk, is shady. These billing changes make some self hosted tile users go from $0 to tens of thousands of dollars a month in usage. It’s shady, don’t lie to yourself.

Also, you are not your company. I am not saying you are shady, because you are just a person who has bills and a skill and you need a salary. Don’t conflate criticisms of your employer as attacks on yourself, or you can have a hard time seeing what other people see. Tricking yourself to believe something that might not be true is one of the worst thing you can do.

Re: Mapbox-gl-js is no longer under the 3-Clause BSD license

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What other alternatives exist? I know now: * openlayers, but vector tiles have no web GL support there * Procedural GL JS * tangram * deck.gl (from Uber) * harp.gl (from HERE Maps)

Will any of these work with LIDAR data under their 3D rendering? I'm keen on industrial archaeology and it's really helpful to have 3D visualisations of sites like old quarries. Stand-alone 3D models can be done like [1] and the detail is substantially better compared to the map 3D views [2] (pits are pits again!) but I want to embed these into a website and start overlaying other data - just like I can with Mapbox m…

Mapbox actually put out this blog post for visualizing point clouds in 3D with GL JS + Deck.GL in May 2019 - should still be totally possible!

https://blog.mapbox.com/coloring-lidar-4522ca5a7186

Re: Mapbox-gl-js is no longer under the 3-Clause BSD license

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

deck.gl is completely independent from Mapbox and Mapbox GL JS. You can use it with Google Maps, for example; most people used it with Mapbox because it was the most advanced open source basemap available. We'll probably end up removing Mapbox from the deck.gl examples, but I can't say for sure.

> We'll probably end up removing Mapbox from the deck.gl examples If that's because of the licensing, would you remove Google Maps & ArcGIS examples as well?

Sorry I painted too wide a brush... Some of the examples are integration examples, and I fully expect we'd have at least one example for Mapbox, Google Maps, ArcGIS, and hopefully more providers in the future.

The rest of the examples are to show deck.gl's capabilities. They currently use Mapbox GL JS v1 (recently changed to use Carto's basemaps so that new users can test deck.gl without any API key). Those examples focusing on deck.gl are what I meant to refer to originally; it seems unlikely we'd move them to GL JS v2, at least, because we aren't currently using Mapbox services with them. (But again, the team hasn't had full discussions about this yet).

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