[themakermark]

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.

[tmcw]

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.

[mousebirdc]

Oh come on Tom. Making a great, free toolkit utterly decimated the competition. Just completely destroyed any funding for a competitor. And I should know.

I believe that you believe this is well intentioned, but it had a very negative impact on open source geospatial software development. Again, I SHOULD KNOW.

Mapbox is doing what is good for Mapbox. It's a company. But let's not pretend this change is good for anyone but Mapbox.

[Doctor_Fegg]

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. 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.

But there's more to it. When the roadmap of an open-source project is tightly controlled by a sponsor, that can make third-party contributions hard or impossible. I know OSRM much better than MBGL so I'll cite an example from that - the distance matrix issue. This is massive for many users, plays right to OSRM's strengths, but Mapbox wouldn't accept patches to provide it for _years_. IIRC it only got in when Mapbox's attention shifted to Valhalla.

I'm not blaming the Mapbox devs at all for that; it wasn't important for Mapbox's business, and any extra code inevitably brings a maintenance burden. But it partly explains why third-party contributors are reluctant to contribute when the roadmap's out of their control.

Back on MBGL, there was/is a community, but the community formed around MVT rather than MBGL specifically - again, possibly because MBGL is just so good. https://github.com/mapbox/awesome-vector-tiles sums up the enormous community energy in the space (I think that might be your document originally, apologies if not). It's kind of a shame that MBGL being so far ahead of everything else has probably crimped development on alternative renderers.

[tuukkah]

I'm really sorry to hear it didn't work out the way Mapbox would have needed. However, pull requests to the core are not the only way to contribute to an open source project: think of all the map data you needed (by OSM contributors), all the bug reports you received, all the code people built that supported your paid product ecosystem (the map APIs).

Regarding code contributions, the community contributed e.g. the TypeScript and React bindings, or am I mistaken?

https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped/blob/mast...

https://github.com/urbica/react-map-gl

https://github.com/visgl/react-map-gl

[andrewharvey]

I'm one of the more frequent non-Mapbox contributors to the project. I've made a lot of PRs over the years and I try to help out with reviewing PRs and to triage incoming issues.

While I agree there has been non-trivial contributions external to the core of gl js (eg. bindings, plugins), and these help the ecosystem, they don't replace work on the core.

Personally I'd hoped that those businesses who were using GL JS commercially without a commercial subscription through Mapbox would contribute and become part of the core development and maintenance, but that didn't happen to a large degree.

[infoseek12]

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.

[durkie]

I don't understand your last paragraph. On the one hand you're saying OSS in 2020 mostly helps companies, but on the other hand you say this dynamic of company-helping is not one that you can build a sustainable business on. Am I missing something?