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Comment by joekrill | Hacker News Reader

I love MapBox -- I am a happy paying customer -- but the title seems a little misleading: what is open source about them? They source their data from OpenStreetMap, which is open-source, but MapBox themselves is not. Or am I missing something?

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They have a lot of open source code:

https://github.com/mapbox/

and it is possible to run the exact setup they charge you for on your own servers using that code. They're basically as open source as a SaaS company could be.

They open source a lot of their software. Check out tilemill:

https://www.mapbox.com/tilemill/

That's really awesome. But I still don't think describing MapBox themselves as "Open-Source" is accurate. There are LOTS Of other companies that open source a lot of their code, but certainly wouldn't be considered "Open-Source" themselves: Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, id, Novell, Oracle. The list goes on.

I certainly don't want to take anything away from MapBox. I really love what they offer. I just don't think it's fair to describe them as "Open-Source".

MapBox does not sell any software or hardware -- all the tools are open source. Unlike Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, id, Novell, Oracle. The list goes on.

Sure they do. They are a SaaS provider. At least I presume that's what they're charging my credit card for every month.

Right, but the software used to do it, and the tools to integrate, are open source, which is the original question above. You can do everything MapBox is doing yourself, on your own, but good luck scaling and making it georedundant at super high volume -- that's MapBox's value add.

I did not realize that. This is exactly what I was asking for clarification on when I first posted. Not sure why we had to get 6 levels deep into the discussion to get to the point, but here we are. Thank you.

as others have pointed out, their map authoring tool, TileMill is open source, as well as many other projects (iD for editing OSM, mapnik is heavily authored by MapBox engineers, etc). But it goes quite a bit beyond even that. Their tile hosting software is mostly open source as well, which they call TileStream. Without too much trouble you can actually recreate the bulk of their SaaS hosting offering using their open source code base. So their SaaS offering is pretty close to fully open source. They're starting to move into premium data (ie satellite data after a natural disaster), so obviously that stuff isn't going to be open, but it is pretty impressive how much of their entire stack they develop on github.

https://github.com/mapbox/

"156 public repos"

https://github.com/twitter/ "100 public repos"

https://github.com/facebook "95 public repos"

https://github.com/37signals "44 public repos"

https://github.com/linkedin "49 public repos"

https://github.com/soundcloud "131 public repos"

These aren't "Open-Source companies". They contribute greatly to open source projects. But aren't themselves "Open-Source".

You can use MapBox's open source software to do everything you'd pay MapBox for on your own. You'll just have your work cut out to autoscale and make it georedundant at high volume, which is MapBox's value add. MapBox isn't selling the software IP, the user, ads, or lock-in.

Simply posting a github link and "156 public repos" doesn't really imply this, though. So thank you for clarifying.

If 37signals were to release basecamp, this would be a better comparison. At that point, I would probably call 37signals an opensource company, even if they ran a SASS model.

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