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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

#101

Post by kylebarron »

karussell wrote: post #43
pheelicks wrote: post #26

What a shame. I guess they got sick of people taking their code and ripping out their API subscriptions. For anyone interested in an open source mapping library (that also has 3D support) that can handle raster data (including the Mapbox tiles), I launched a project 2 weeks ago that is the culmination of 7 years effort: https://github.com/felixpalmer/procedural-gl-js/ . I must say (while acknowledging my huge bias) t…

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)

Note that deck.gl was originally developed inside Uber, but was donated to the Urban Computing Foundation (part of the Linux Foundation) and is now under open governance.

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

#102

Post by [deleted] »

themakermark wrote: post #94
tmcw wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote that paragraph and I agree with the decision to change GL JS's licensing.

I'd be interested to hear why. I have no problem with companies choosing not to open source in the first place, it is just the idea of taking an open source project with an active community around it and closing it up that is a tough pill to swallow.

[deleted]

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

#103

Post by resoluteteeth »

pheelicks wrote: post #26

What a shame. I guess they got sick of people taking their code and ripping out their API subscriptions. For anyone interested in an open source mapping library (that also has 3D support) that can handle raster data (including the Mapbox tiles), I launched a project 2 weeks ago that is the culmination of 7 years effort: https://github.com/felixpalmer/procedural-gl-js/ . I must say (while acknowledging my huge bias) t…

> For anyone interested in an open source mapping library (that also has 3D support) that can handle raster data (including the Mapbox tiles), I launched a project 2 weeks ago that is the culmination of 7 years effort: https://github.com/felixpalmer/procedural-gl-js/.

This is really impressive. Just one question about the distance fog, though: as you say it does give the scene scale when you're close to ground, but if you zoom out everything becomes foggy so it seems like it kind of gets hard to see anything. Wouldn't it make sense to somehow reduce the fog as you zoom out so this doesn't happen?

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

#104

Post by tmcw »

themakermark wrote: post #94
tmcw wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote that paragraph and I agree with the decision to change GL JS's licensing.

I'd be interested to hear why. I have no problem with companies choosing not to open source in the first place, it is just the idea of taking an open source project with an active community around it and closing it up that is a tough pill to swallow.

I won't get into all the context, but I think we should consider whether a community without contributors is a community. GL JS never had major active contributors outside of the company, and there are no self-funded webgl experts with lots of time who are ready to maintain a fork.

OSS, we hoped, was about enabling people and unlocking people's ability to collaborate. It turns out that in 2020, it's mostly helping companies and getting nothing in return. That's not a dynamic you can build a sustainable business on.

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

#105

Post by josephcsible »

lukeqsee wrote: post #37
gorbypark wrote: post #19

Well, that sucks. I've been a happy Mapbox GL JS user for years, hosting my own tiles and not using their service at all. I even had a few (very small) pull requests accepted into the project. Hopefully the OSS community can maintain a fork of the 1.x codebase. -edit- The FAQ says developers can still use self hosted tiles, but also says that usage is now billed per map load, and "a map load occurs whenever a Map obj…

> To me that sound like while I can still use my own map tiles, it would still costs the same as if I used Mapbox hosted tiles. That's my reading of it, as well. Even though it's somewhat expected on the data collection side, it's decidedly unexpected that they not only require ToS acceptance, but also licensing fees for what used to be entirely free, OSS software. > Hopefully the OSS community can maintain a fork of…

Hopefully the fork will be GPL, so Mapbox won't be able to steal all of the work the new developers do and release it in their new proprietary product.

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

#106

Post by infoseek12 »

tmcw wrote: post #104
themakermark wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested to hear why. I have no problem with companies choosing not to open source in the first place, it is just the idea of taking an open source project with an active community around it and closing it up that is a tough pill to swallow.

I won't get into all the context, but I think we should consider whether a community without contributors is a community. GL JS never had major active contributors outside of the company, and there are no self-funded webgl experts with lots of time who are ready to maintain a fork. OSS, we hoped, was about enabling people and unlocking people's ability to collaborate. It turns out that in 2020, it's mostly helping co…

An incredible ironic statement since what you’ve done is only possible because of open source. If you don’t realize that taking a huge dump on the open source community will have profound consequences for Mapbox then you’re in for a surprise.

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

#107

Post by josephcsible »

ccmcarey wrote: post #41

How are they able to change the license of code that people committed under the 3-clause BSD license without the permission of those people?

Because the BSD license is a permissive/pushover license, which let you relicense other people's work as proprietary. The reason that copyleft licenses like the GPL are better is exactly that they don't allow this sort of behavior.

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

#108

Post by anamexis »

josephcsible wrote: post #105
lukeqsee wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me that sound like while I can still use my own map tiles, it would still costs the same as if I used Mapbox hosted tiles. That's my reading of it, as well. Even though it's somewhat expected on the data collection side, it's decidedly unexpected that they not only require ToS acceptance, but also licensing fees for what used to be entirely free, OSS software. > Hopefully the OSS community can maintain a fork of…

Hopefully the fork will be GPL, so Mapbox won't be able to steal all of the work the new developers do and release it in their new proprietary product.

Why not? Mapbox has been allowing us to steal the work of their developers and release it in our proprietary products up until this point.

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

#109

Post by et-al »

harrisonjackson wrote: post #88
et-al wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

afaik, Mapbox's geocoding service was never meant to provide the lng,lat of retail entities. Looking over their API docs, you can search for points of interest (POI), but that's it: https://docs.mapbox.com/api/search/geocoding/ For your use case, you should look into a geocoding service [0]. And then you can display the location results with your mapping library of choice. Google Maps does provide an all-inclusive se…

> The Mapbox Geocoding API does two things: forward geocoding and reverse geocoding. Forward geocoding converts location text into geographic coordinates, turning 2 Lincoln Memorial Circle NW into -77.050,38.889. https://www.mapbox.com/place-search I think "location text" is the part they are not parsing well. The screenshots all over that page show someone entering a couple of letters and getting the resulting POI w…

You're right, Mapbox does claim to search for businesses.

If you're sticking with Mapbox, you'd probably need to a two-step lookup to obtain some useful results.

1. If there's no street address, check the search string to see if there's a city, or city, state. Find the lng,lat of that to use as the proximity bias. If nothing exists, use the user's current location. (Maybe this is why the mobile SDK is better.)

2. Then add the proximity bias while searching for the POI

But just a heads up, even a simple city query can be problematic. From personal experience, "san jose" would return San Jose in Costa Rica, or San Jose City in the Philippines, and rarely San Jose, CA, US unless a user was to type all that.

Google definitely has better NLP to handle user search queries.

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

#110

Post by [deleted] »

infoseek12 wrote: post #106
tmcw wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't get into all the context, but I think we should consider whether a community without contributors is a community. GL JS never had major active contributors outside of the company, and there are no self-funded webgl experts with lots of time who are ready to maintain a fork. OSS, we hoped, was about enabling people and unlocking people's ability to collaborate. It turns out that in 2020, it's mostly helping co…

An incredible ironic statement since what you’ve done is only possible because of open source. If you don’t realize that taking a huge dump on the open source community will have profound consequences for Mapbox then you’re in for a surprise.

[deleted]
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