Microsoft Joins the MapLibre Sponsorship Program

Awesome news. I think Mapbox made a mistake when they started charging for using their open source library with non Mapbox maps. But it's good that MapLibre picked up the work. I migrated my project to MapLibre a long time ago. Still missing some plugins, but mostly works great.

At my day job we’re heavily invested in Leaflet for historical reasons, but toward the end of last year added Maplibre as a layer on top of it via the excellent https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-gl-leaflet. This has allowed us to begin transitioning gradually instead of being forced to jump all at once.

It’s hard to beat the simplicity of Leaflet, but neither it nor OpenLayers can handle Mapbox Vector Tiles in a performant enough manner, so Maplibre is the future for us.

I was not aware of Microsoft’s involvement. It’s great to see some big players using it too!

The learning curve is pretty steep on GIS stuff in general. But, I found maplibre to work well both pulling out events and pumping in data via PMTiles or GeoJson on my django+htmx stack.

My only major snag was debugging some nonsensical errors when I was testing pmtiles with maplibre on a webserver that didn’t support ranged requests.

This is extremely good news.

MapLibre is an awesome project, but it has huge problems with 3D terrain. In my opinion the entire 3D "stack" needs to be completely rewritten in order to properly support terrain, because navigation panning/zooming is badly broken, where the devil is in the detail. At a first glance all seems OK, but when you really use it, you'll notice that it's pure chaos which leads to errors in navigation. Also overlaying images over terrain is broken. It's always terrain what causes the problem.

In 2D it's rock solid.

> Bing Maps deploys MapLibre GL JS in production, a feat which was only possible thanks to performance improvements that were contributed to MapLibre by Bing Maps Engineers.

Does anyone ever use Bing maps for anything?

Sometimes when I see a complaint about Apple/Google Maps I like to check Bing Maps for the same thing. I invariably find it's even worse, but nobody noticed because they didn't look.

They do occasionally have the best quality satellite maps though; nobody likes updating those because they're very expensive and generally the least useful mode.

I started to migrate from Mapbox GL JS but I'm still waiting for 3D globe support to fully switch.

I also need to compare bundle sizes and load times. Last time I checked Mapbox v2 was faster.

The website and the PDF in the about give a general idea of the organization goals but I couldn't figure where are the actual tools and libraries or the source code. :/

Neat! This is the first time I heard about MapLibre. It seems that you'd use it over Leaflet if you're looking for vector tiles as opposed to raster?

Knowing Microsoft it's probably for some malicious purposes

Embrace, extend, and extinguish