2020 strike again! Seriously though, this article makes some assumptions I’m not sure about. One of them is that Mapbox’s move will be successful. I’m not sure

2020 strike again! Seriously though, this article makes some assumptions I’m not sure about. One of them is that Mapbox’s move will be successful. I’m not sure it will be, most users of Mapbox probably won’t upgrade to the new version or will upgrade to whatever fork becomes most popular. In the meantime this is going to make people a lot warier of using them as a tile server and give impetus to their competitors in that market space. It’s quite possible they’ll start to see declining revenues pretty soon. The success of their strategy is tied to the greatly expanded 3D capabilities of version two. It’s really cool and the demos are super sexy but for the vast majority of use cases 2D maps are a better fit. Given the distrust they’ve generated and the massive increase in licensing cost attached to their new model for many customers, there are now some extremely compelling reasons for customers to drop them.