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I wouldn't be working for Mapbox if it actually were a villainous company with an evil plan to "bait and switch" with open source, or undercut all these small c

I wouldn't be working for Mapbox if it actually were a villainous company with an evil plan to "bait and switch" with open source, or undercut all these small competing businesses just out of spite, and it's easy to succumb to these simplistic conspiracies in the heat of the moment, but I do hope these sentiments will be short-lived.

anonfornoreason 6y ago
“Oh look here’s an unattended purse, I need the money so I’ll just take it. They left it here anyway” Introducing a drastic billing change under the implied threat that your year or more of man hours performed using an underlying open source library with an understandable billing model is now potentially at risk, is shady. These billing changes make some self hosted tile users go from $0 to tens of thousands of dollars a month in usage. It’s shady, don’t lie to yourself. Also, you are not your company. I am not saying you are shady, because you are just a person who has bills and a skill and you need a salary. Don’t conflate criticisms of your employer as attacks on yourself, or you can have a hard time seeing what other people see. Tricking yourself to believe something that might not be true is one of the worst thing you can do.
- morgenkaffee 6y ago
  > These billing changes make some self hosted tile users go from $0 to tens of thousands of dollars a month in usage. It’s shady, don’t lie to yourself. This only happens if the developer deliberately upgrades and adds a token. If you do nothing and you keep using v1 - nothing changes for you.
  - anonfornoreason 6y ago
    That's the implied threat. Our business puts serious engineering efforts behind maps, such that it takes months of effort to change out mapping clients. We do this across three platforms. It will continue working for a while, but that $250k we just spent will need to be re-spent in the next 1-2 years as the old library falls to the wayside. The frustrating thing is that we just went through this with google. We paid a reasonable amount, but then got extorted to pay more or jump ship. We jumped ship to a reputable company, mapbox, and we paid a reasonable sum of money for how we used the software, and now the cycle continues. To be clear, I am not complaining that we are paying $0 and we should get the benefits for free. I am saying that we shouldn't be jumped up multiple orders of magnitude in cost, which isn't in-line with our actual usage. That's the shady part.

anonfornoreason 6y ago

“Oh look here’s an unattended purse, I need the money so I’ll just take it. They left it here anyway” Introducing a drastic billing change under the implied threat that your year or more of man hours performed using an underlying open source library with an understandable billing model is now potentially at risk, is shady. These billing changes make some self hosted tile users go from $0 to tens of thousands of dollars a month in usage. It’s shady, don’t lie to yourself. Also, you are not your company. I am not saying you are shady, because you are just a person who has bills and a skill and you need a salary. Don’t conflate criticisms of your employer as attacks on yourself, or you can have a hard time seeing what other people see. Tricking yourself to believe something that might not be true is one of the worst thing you can do.

morgenkaffee 6y ago
> These billing changes make some self hosted tile users go from $0 to tens of thousands of dollars a month in usage. It’s shady, don’t lie to yourself. This only happens if the developer deliberately upgrades and adds a token. If you do nothing and you keep using v1 - nothing changes for you.
- anonfornoreason 6y ago
  That's the implied threat. Our business puts serious engineering efforts behind maps, such that it takes months of effort to change out mapping clients. We do this across three platforms. It will continue working for a while, but that $250k we just spent will need to be re-spent in the next 1-2 years as the old library falls to the wayside. The frustrating thing is that we just went through this with google. We paid a reasonable amount, but then got extorted to pay more or jump ship. We jumped ship to a reputable company, mapbox, and we paid a reasonable sum of money for how we used the software, and now the cycle continues. To be clear, I am not complaining that we are paying $0 and we should get the benefits for free. I am saying that we shouldn't be jumped up multiple orders of magnitude in cost, which isn't in-line with our actual usage. That's the shady part.