

When the roadmap of an open-source project is tightly controlled by a sponsor, that can make third-party contributions hard or impossible. Another reason is that they're simply great libraries and there hasn't been that much reason for anyone to contribute - I can only ever recall encountering one significant issue and it wasn't a showstopper.īut there's more to it. It's certainly true that GL JS and Native never really got third-party contributors, and that the complexity of the task is a major reason like you say, there aren't many GL hobby devs. I've been working recently with Tangram, so contact me (see user link) if you have questions or are interested in collaborating! * OpenLayers: has some vector and WebGL capabilities now as well * Tangram: - another WebGL based renderer with some key advantages over MapboxGL JS such as custom shaders and canvas text I hope this licensing change can spur some competition among open source renderers.

* A tiled data format that is open source: * A font to SDF renderer that is open source:

* Smooth SDF text rendering with decent i18n support * A single style specification format that works well for both base map rendering and data overlays Creating a map renderer that matches the user experience of Google Maps is a FAANG-level effort, and Mapbox GL also encompasses: Mapbox has been extremely generous in releasing their rendering libraries under a permissive license.
