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Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

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

#191

Post by stevage »

stevage wrote: post #186
nevi-me wrote: post #179

I've been using Google maps for a decade, and when they started offering a $200 credit, it was fine until my bill started going up to $200-300 after the credits. It's for a hobby project that's outlasted well-funded projects, so the traffic kept increasing as competitors folded. A few years back, I tried to run my own tileserver, but the difficulty of creating an updated vector tileset put me off, and I just continue…

If you can be more specific in your questions I can probably help. I've been full time consulting in mapbox and maplibre for 7 years.

Best way is to try it. It just depends whether you have used any really recent features.

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

#192

Post by apitman »

l3x wrote: post #39
jenny91 wrote: post #32

I really like the idea. Why OMT instead of protomaps? The latter is clearly where the community is moving towards (albeit very slowly). I'm somewhat sceptical about the "free with no API keys" idea. I guess your service is not guaranteed to be up so no one too big will rely on it. But what if you start getting abuse or someone using them on some humongous site (e.g. one of those cheap restaurant email builders that a…

From the FAQs on GitHub [1] > What about PMTiles? > I would have loved to use PMTiles; they are a brilliant idea! > Unfortunately, making range requests in 80 GB files just doesn't work in production. It is fine for files smaller than 500 MB, but it has terrible latency and caching issues for full planet datasets. > If PMTiles implements splitting to [1] https://github.com/hyperknot/openfreemap

That's an interesting claim. I make range requests to 100GB+ files (genomics) all the time for work and it works great. I've never considered total file size as directly related to latency in this respect, assuming you have some sort of an index of course.

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

#193

Post by aiiane »

runxel wrote: post #178
uneekname wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key problem here is a lack of accurate data. OSM is amazing, but is constantly getting improved and closer to realtime "ground truth." Historical OSM data is usually worse all-around, rather than "equally good, but as of year XXXX" Perhaps there is a different dataset with better historical accuracy than OSM, but I do not know of one. You'd likely have to reduce your scope: trails in a specific park? Roads in a s…

As a hobby historian (not really haha) I'm interested in old streets and names particularly. Especially here in Europe / Germany, where entire quarters where bombed to rubbles newer streets do not match neither namely nor spatially. I loved how you could "move back in time" in street view. I think that has been killed too? There is a lovely Twitter/X account for Detroit tho: https://x.com/DetroitStreetVu

You can still go back in time on Street View. There's a "See more dates" link next to the address info in the top left (at least on the desktop Maps interface) that when you click it opens a film strip of different dated captures for that location. Here's the 2007 capture of 1 Embarcadero (outside the Ferry Building in San Francisco) for example: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ArrucFgus9uMvdSaA

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

#195

Post by ryantgtg »

hyperknot wrote: post #173
ryantgtg wrote: post #150

Neat! We used to host our own mbtiles map for like $11/mo, but the problem was (this was prior to planetiler and people generating public worldwide mbtile dumps) there wasn't a free/cheap source for regularly-updated mbtiles. The dump from OpenMapTiles was not updated for years. So we gave up and went to mapbox, where we regularly exceed the monthly free tier for web, but they give us a discount. Because that is a sc…

Thank you for sharing the story! I hope OpenFreeMap can contribute either with the MBTiles / Btrfs dumps, or with the public instance.

Thanks for offering the service! The intensity of map tile pricing is always a little baffling to me. For example, with mapbox this month we (got linked to on The Verge and) exceeded the free tier on the 22nd. Two days later and we have a $40 bill and counting, with a week left in the month. We're a free, open source project and can't handle dynamic pricing like this.

My only feedback on your tiles is the lack of POIs. Mostly just bus stops and an occasional supermarket in my area. But I see from the github that this is on the roadmap.

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

#196

Post by bdon »

dvdkon wrote: post #167
bdon wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I'm certain that you can build software to some specification without ever agreeing to the spec text's licence

That is exactly the opposite of OMT's copyright interpretation: https://github.com/openmaptiles/openmaptiles?tab=readme-ov-f...

> You just need to include both licences.

That is the definition of license incompatibility as described in the Creative Commons documentation above. The license is open source and a good fit for if you are running a paid map SaaS or free service as an end product, but is not compatible with the open source ecosystem as a building block.

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

#197

Post by professor_x »

stevage wrote: post #186
nevi-me wrote: post #179

I've been using Google maps for a decade, and when they started offering a $200 credit, it was fine until my bill started going up to $200-300 after the credits. It's for a hobby project that's outlasted well-funded projects, so the traffic kept increasing as competitors folded. A few years back, I tried to run my own tileserver, but the difficulty of creating an updated vector tileset put me off, and I just continue…

If you can be more specific in your questions I can probably help. I've been full time consulting in mapbox and maplibre for 7 years.

Im just someone interested in geospatial. Im a regular SWE. Seems like Any tips in general? Not just for breaking in but what you wish you knew

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

#198

Post by bdon »

apitman wrote: post #192
l3x wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the FAQs on GitHub [1] > What about PMTiles? > I would have loved to use PMTiles; they are a brilliant idea! > Unfortunately, making range requests in 80 GB files just doesn't work in production. It is fine for files smaller than 500 MB, but it has terrible latency and caching issues for full planet datasets. > If PMTiles implements splitting to [1] https://github.com/hyperknot/openfreemap

That's an interesting claim. I make range requests to 100GB+ files (genomics) all the time for work and it works great. I've never considered total file size as directly related to latency in this respect, assuming you have some sort of an index of course.

You can test this claim directly against a AWS S3 bucket.

First 100KB of a 100GB+ file:

curl -H "Range: bytes=0-100000" https://overturemaps-tiles-us-west-2-beta.s3.amazonaws.com/2... --output tmp -w "%{time_total}"

First 100KB at the 100GB mark:

curl -H "Range: bytes=100000000000-100000100000" https://overturemaps-tiles-us-west-2-beta.s3.amazonaws.com/2... --output tmp -w "%{time_total}"

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

#199

Post by bdon »

wcedmisten wrote: post #122
bdon wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latency for small files and ranges of large files is pretty similar on most storage platforms, but there are some exceptions like Cloudflare R2. The main reason PMTiles is one file and not two or more files is that it enables atomic updates in-place (which every mature storage platform supports) as well as ETag content change detection in downstream caches. All of the server and serverless implementations at http…

Now I'm curious, what causes the latency for range requests with R2?

I don't have any insight into this other than observing how their storage system works, but here's some scripts I made last year to test:

https://github.com/bdon/cloudflare-r2-latency

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

#200

Post by bdon »

ryantgtg wrote: post #183
uneekname wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your application allows for it, I also recommend checking out Protomaps / PMTiles. Brandon has some insanely cool work making a tile format and related infrastructure that scales nicely.

I wanted to, but I was unable to get Protomaps working in our application, unfortunately. I'm not much of a js person (or a dev) and it was a bigger change than I could apparently handle in our rails app. Actually, thinking back on it, I think the main issue - or at least the one immediately presenting itself - was a CORS problem (a friend was hosting the PMTiles in their DO Spaces). And then I ran out of patience.

Thanks for giving it a try! If you're going to revisit this, we could improve the docs around setting CORS configuration on DigitalOcean: https://docs.protomaps.com/pmtiles/cloud-storage#digitalocea...
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