mapbox-gl-js VS OpenLayers3

> too bad it doesn't come with some code

Mapbox changed the license of their code last year I think to a proprietary one. https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-js/blob/main/LICENSE.txt

It requires a mapbox user license with billing enabled to use this code, let alone make modifications. But the source is viewable on github.

From https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-js

> Mapbox gl-js version 2.0 or higher (“Mapbox Web SDK”) must be used according to the Mapbox Terms of Service. This license allows developers with a current active Mapbox account to use and modify the Mapbox Web SDK. Developers may modify the Mapbox Web SDK code so long as the modifications do not change or interfere with marked portions of the code related to billing, accounting, and anonymized data collection. The Mapbox Web SDK only sends anonymized usage data, which Mapbox uses for fixing bugs and errors, accounting, and generating aggregated anonymized statistics. This license terminates automatically if a user no longer has an active Mapbox account.

Seems their client code does some things related to "billing, accounting, and anonymized data collection" and they don't want programmers to disable or modify that code.

Is that right? Anyone who has followed this have more information? I haven't used mapbox in a few years but I think it's great technology.

The software stopped being open source from v2 onwards. The new licence makes it merely shared source.

This GitHub issue where this change is announced provides a number of more in-depth explanations why this is a bad thing for most users of the software: https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-js/issues/10162

It's a bummer mapbox isn't open source anymore, now you're (and lots of other peoplare) are stuck pre-2.0.0 :(

https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-js/blob/main/CHANGELOG.m...

Web-site: https://www.mapbox.com/ GitHub stars: 6.1k, https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-js Pricing: Free, starts from $2.40 for 1000 loads Map Data Source: Mapbox Dependencies: None License: Mapbox copyright Category: Web Application Examples: https://docs.mapbox.com/mapbox-gl-js/examples/

The main library it uses is https://openlayers.org/

Making your geospatial dataset available on the web using a standard, unlocks a world of possibilities. It means that many existing (or future) client applications will be able to read your data, out-of-the-box. For instance, anyone can use QGIS, Esri ArcGIS, React-leaflet, OpenLayers or Python OWSlib to pull your data and analyse it, or create products or services on top of it.

A shout-out about the mention Open Route Service, which is IMO fantastic.

I wrote a small mapping app to do navigation when we moved cross-continent a few years back. I didn't want to have to worry about trying to pull map data over the Internet, since I wasn't certain that I would even have Internet during the journey. I whipped together a small app using map tile data from OSM (great project), got the directions in a usable format (GeoJSON) from Open Route Service (great project) and rendered the entire thing with OpenLayers (https://openlayers.org/), a JS library (great project). We had a USB GPS tracker¹ hooked to a laptop that tracked our route/position.

(We also did occasionally use Google Maps on the phones, too. For some tasks, that was easier.)

¹hardware GPS is so much nicer than phone. Near instant fix, vs. both our phone's 30s to several minute fix times…

We are also going to use a javascript library to visualize our data. I have found OpenLayers, and more specifically the Vue 3 Flavor, to be super simple to work with. Finally, let's let at parts one through three.

26) OpenLayers

It didn't take long to discover OpenLayers, and after some experimentation I was surprised to find that their heatmap implementation is objectively better than Google's. But while the OpenStreetMap data is provided for free, their tile servers are not, so I also needed a way to serve my own tiles.