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Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

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Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#161
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main project is MapHub, it gives me my income. It's not an income like you'd get in a FAANG job, but still, I'm running it for making a living. For MapHub to work, I had to invest in my own tile server infrastructure: there is no way I could have made MapHub financially profitable with a 3rd party tile provider. So I kept iterating and iterating on the tile server infrastructure and after 9 years I arrived at a st…

Have you been running this for long? I've looked for something in this space for the last couple of years but only came across MapTiler /AGOL and a few others, that were either pretty expensive (for small datasets) or restrictive functionality. If so I'd say you need to work on the SEO and findability side.

I've literally just launched it.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#162

Very cool, love the various tile sets (especially the 3d layer!) One thing that tripped me up is the zoom -- the affordance for zoom in/out across most other mapping UIs is via mouse motions -- how come in your demo it's restricted to the +/- buttons? Perhaps I missed something... Thanks for sharing this, looks very neat.

On the main page I disabled scroll zoom, because it hijacks your scroll and literally you cannot scroll through the map. It makes sense for full-screen maps only. Of course, you have 100% control over exactly what controls you configure with MapLibre, when you set up your app.

Ah nice, of course it's configurable :)

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#163

About displaying the vector tiles, which project goes well with it? I like Leaflet and worked extensively with it, but it has some compatibility problems with vector tiles and other small issues when dragging vector tiles for example. Is Maplibre the gold standard for vector tiles now?

Maplibre works fine, there is even a plugin so you can use it in Leaflet. And it's a well maintained project.

The other one is Mapbox GL from which Maplibre was forked. But you only use that with their tiles now.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly, it's to save space. For example there is one such tile for "ocean", which covers 70% of earth. In total, there are 271 million hard links. So out of 300 million files 271 are hard links! The file system limit is 64k hard-links for the same file, so I have to handle the case when it's reached and then start a new file for the next 64k.

> The file system limit is 64k hard-links for the same file I had never heard that, so I went sniffing around and it seems to be ext4 specific[1] but I wasn't able to easily get the limits for ZFS (or xfs, etc), so depending on how much glucose one wished to spend it may be better to use a different FS than all that renaming work around 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_link#Limitations

The whole extract_mbtiles.py file is 97 lines of code. This contains parsing MBTiles, writing metadata and some CLI specific lines. It's actually quite a concise script for doing this while taking care of the hard-link limits.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#165
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly, it's to save space. For example there is one such tile for "ocean", which covers 70% of earth. In total, there are 271 million hard links. So out of 300 million files 271 are hard links! The file system limit is 64k hard-links for the same file, so I have to handle the case when it's reached and then start a new file for the next 64k.

Just out of curiosity, is there no clever way to solve this within nginx with rules instead?

The Linux kernel's filesystem cache is actually really efficient at doing this. I doubt we could come up with a nginx scripting solution which could be equally efficient.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#166

About displaying the vector tiles, which project goes well with it? I like Leaflet and worked extensively with it, but it has some compatibility problems with vector tiles and other small issues when dragging vector tiles for example. Is Maplibre the gold standard for vector tiles now?

Yes, MapLibre is the gold standard now.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#167
post #96
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OpenMapTiles, which OpenFreeMap uses, while open source, does not have a license that encourages derivative works Can you elaborate on this ? I'm derivating OMT and am quite worried now ^^

OMT use a CC-BY license: https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm... (edit: link) This means that software that implements OMT, even if written from scratch, cannot be re-used by other FOSS projects (Apache, BSD, GPL, AGPL, other software in the OpenStreetMap ecosystem, etc) without affecting the license. Ideally for Protomaps it should be possible to re-use just one portion - like only the label…

Are you talking about just the OpenMapTiles spec, or some adjacent software? I'm certain that you can build software to some specification without ever agreeing to the spec text's licence, and that a CC-BY licenced spec doesn't limit any implementing system's licence.

Even so, CC-BY is permissive and you could include CC-BY content in a, say, GPL project. You just need to include both licences.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#168

As a Roman, the decision on how to prioritize the labels seems very interesting to me! https://i.postimg.cc/tCn1xSRF/image.png p.s. very cool project indeed edit: I don't know how it happened, but while panning the map with the mouse, the map flipped upside down. https://i.postimg.cc/sggZ2pHh/image.png

Thank you for sharing this, I'll make a issue about both.

The Vatican situation is trickier than you'd think, as it's on country level, while Rome is on city level, and naturally you'd want to give countries a priority over cities. Like on low zooms you only want to show countries, then as it gets closer you show cities. Well, except for Vatican.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#169

This is really cool, I'll definitely look at this if I need to embed a map in the future. Are there any libraries that lets you plot geographic data on top of this in Python, with Matplotlib or similar? Slightly off topic, but how come there doesn't seem to be any open projects using the Overture maps data? > Overture is a data-centric map project, not a community of individual map editors. Therefore, Overture is int…

I develop Lonboard [0], a Python library for plotting large geospatial data. If you have small data (~max 30,000 coordinates), leaflet-based Python libraries like folium and ipyleaflet can be fine, but because Lonboard uses deck.gl for GPU-accelerated rendering, it's 30-50x faster than leaflet for large datasets [1].

[0]: https://developmentseed.org/lonboard/latest/

[1]: https://developmentseed.org/lonboard/latest/how-it-works/

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#170

About displaying the vector tiles, which project goes well with it? I like Leaflet and worked extensively with it, but it has some compatibility problems with vector tiles and other small issues when dragging vector tiles for example. Is Maplibre the gold standard for vector tiles now?

Yes. It's active. But it's imperative. I didn't find a good React interface to MapLibre. See Streetcomplete switching to MapLibre.

https://visgl.github.io/react-map-gl/ is a react interface to MapLibre
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