> And with the ugly side effect of salting the earth for any other map startups I'm unsure on that. Mapbox built a bunch of good tech (mostly around vector til

> And with the ugly side effect of salting the earth for any other map startups I'm unsure on that. Mapbox built a bunch of good tech (mostly around vector tiles), open-sourced it, and then lost interest in smaller customers in their rush for the petrodollar. This has been genuinely great for bootstrapped map businesses. You can easily list a dozen who are using .mvt tech right now and making a good living out of it. True, it wasn't good for Mapzen. But I can't weep too many tears for something funded with Samsung Accelerator magic money, much though they did hire one of the smartest teams in the business - Softbank vs Samsung is not a battle I can bring myself to care about. I 100% agree with you that Mapbox went too far, too fast. But on balance I think their trajectory has (unintentionally) been good for wider mapping tech.