[lukeqsee]

> PMTiles aside, this is still Mapbox’s world.

Isn't this a bit like saying we're still in Google's world because most maps still use Web Mercator? :)

Good tech builds on what came before. Mapbox did a lot of ground-breaking work in building tooling around OSM, but so have many others. The fact that they named it Mapbox Vector Tiles is genius in hindsight, because even though we may use tons of tooling they didn't create to build and render them, their name is still there.

> The next challenge is to evolve the tech stack to something beyond what Mapbox worked up five/ten years ago.

Agreed, and I think we've seen a lot of iterative work in the open since then. The next challenge is likely building a OSS stack to do proper 3D: open data (including OSM) to pixels, and that work is already beginning across a lot of organizations: https://github.com/nyurik/future-mvt/discussions, Overture Maps, MapLibre, etc.

[twelvechairs]

I get the parent comment. There are good alteratives to the mapbox ecosystem though they arent always used because people see mapbox as default

DeckGL for instance is a very innovative js library for front end (really developed by Uber I believe), with better 3d and movement, better with dealing data at scale, etc.

Prettymaps is a pure python approach to rendering OSM data.

Etc.