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So Protomaps is a really full stack map platform, they are competing with kind of like 3-4 projects at once: - There is the Protomaps schema. It's competing wi

So Protomaps is a really full stack map platform, they are competing with kind of like 3-4 projects at once: - There is the Protomaps schema. It's competing with OpenMapTiles and Shortbread (https://shortbread-tiles.org/ https://shortbread-tiles.org/) - There is the Protomaps file format. It's competing with MBTiles and say Btrfs images in OpenFreeMap. - There is the Protomaps styles. It's competing with OSM Liberty and OSM Bright styles (https://github.com/maputnik/osm-liberty https://github.com/maputnik/osm-liberty) - There is the way to host the tiles, on CloudFlare workers, range requests, etc. It's competing with MBTiles servers or OpenFreeMap's nginx servers. About getting abuse, how do you imagine it gets abuse? It's a static file showing OpenStreetMap data. I mean traffic is the only thing what can be a problem, but I think Hetzner should be good till 30-100 TB per server.

bauruine 2y ago
I did 150TB+ on a 40 Euro Hetzner server for years without any issue and also did the same amount in a similar price range on multiple different providers. The cloud and CDNs charge a huge markup.
- hyperknot 2y ago
  That's great to know! I know of one story where someone got terminated on Hetzner because of the bandwidth but it turned out he was also running a Tor node.
bdon 2y ago
1) The Protomaps schema is mostly a re-implementation of the Tilezen project https://tilezen.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://tilezen.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ which is a linux foundation project. OpenMapTiles, which OpenFreeMap uses, while open source, does not have a license that encourages derivative works or enables distributing styles under a standard FOSS software license (https://www.npmjs.com/package/protomaps-themes-base https://www.npmjs.com/package/protomaps-themes-base). That's also one motivation for developing Shortbread which is at this point less developed than Tilezen. 2) The file format (PMTiles) addresses a different audience than either MBTiles or Btrfs images. Both of those require administering a server for tiles, while PMTiles requires static blob storage and nothing else. You do have the option of using a server like MBTiles/btrfs which ought to be comparable in latency, and that's documented here: https://docs.protomaps.com/deploy/ https://docs.protomaps.com/deploy/ as well as Lambda, Cloudflare Workers, Google Cloud Run and Azure Serverless functions. 3) There are no existing styles for MapLibre GL that work off the Tilezen layer, generalization and tagging scheme, so we need to develop one style, with multiple themes.
- maelito 2y ago
  > OpenMapTiles, which OpenFreeMap uses, while open source, does not have a license that encourages derivative works Can you elaborate on this ? I'm derivating OMT and am quite worried now ^^
  - bdon 2y ago
    OMT use a CC-BY license: https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm... (edit: link) This means that software that implements OMT, even if written from scratch, cannot be re-used by other FOSS projects (Apache, BSD, GPL, AGPL, other software in the OpenStreetMap ecosystem, etc) without affecting the license. Ideally for Protomaps it should be possible to re-use just one portion - like only the label layer with your own layers from other sources, or even bundle it as a JS dependency in another open source project - without affecting the license of downstream projects.
    - dvdkon 2y ago
      Are you talking about just the OpenMapTiles spec, or some adjacent software? I'm certain that you can build software to some specification without ever agreeing to the spec text's licence, and that a CC-BY licenced spec doesn't limit any implementing system's licence. Even so, CC-BY is permissive and you could include CC-BY content in a, say, GPL project. You just need to include both licences.
      - bdon 2y ago
        > I'm certain that you can build software to some specification without ever agreeing to the spec text's licence That is exactly the opposite of OMT's copyright interpretation: https://github.com/openmaptiles/openmaptiles?tab=readme-ov-file#license https://github.com/openmaptiles/openmaptiles?tab=readme-ov-f... > You just need to include both licences. That is the definition of license incompatibility as described in the Creative Commons documentation above. The license is open source and a good fit for if you are running a paid map SaaS or free service as an end product, but is not compatible with the open source ecosystem as a building block.

bauruine 2y ago

I did 150TB+ on a 40 Euro Hetzner server for years without any issue and also did the same amount in a similar price range on multiple different providers. The cloud and CDNs charge a huge markup.

hyperknot 2y ago
That's great to know! I know of one story where someone got terminated on Hetzner because of the bandwidth but it turned out he was also running a Tor node.

bdon 2y ago

1) The Protomaps schema is mostly a re-implementation of the Tilezen project https://tilezen.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://tilezen.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ which is a linux foundation project. OpenMapTiles, which OpenFreeMap uses, while open source, does not have a license that encourages derivative works or enables distributing styles under a standard FOSS software license (https://www.npmjs.com/package/protomaps-themes-base https://www.npmjs.com/package/protomaps-themes-base). That's also one motivation for developing Shortbread which is at this point less developed than Tilezen. 2) The file format (PMTiles) addresses a different audience than either MBTiles or Btrfs images. Both of those require administering a server for tiles, while PMTiles requires static blob storage and nothing else. You do have the option of using a server like MBTiles/btrfs which ought to be comparable in latency, and that's documented here: https://docs.protomaps.com/deploy/ https://docs.protomaps.com/deploy/ as well as Lambda, Cloudflare Workers, Google Cloud Run and Azure Serverless functions. 3) There are no existing styles for MapLibre GL that work off the Tilezen layer, generalization and tagging scheme, so we need to develop one style, with multiple themes.

maelito 2y ago
> OpenMapTiles, which OpenFreeMap uses, while open source, does not have a license that encourages derivative works Can you elaborate on this ? I'm derivating OMT and am quite worried now ^^
- bdon 2y ago
  OMT use a CC-BY license: https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm... (edit: link) This means that software that implements OMT, even if written from scratch, cannot be re-used by other FOSS projects (Apache, BSD, GPL, AGPL, other software in the OpenStreetMap ecosystem, etc) without affecting the license. Ideally for Protomaps it should be possible to re-use just one portion - like only the label layer with your own layers from other sources, or even bundle it as a JS dependency in another open source project - without affecting the license of downstream projects.
  - dvdkon 2y ago
    Are you talking about just the OpenMapTiles spec, or some adjacent software? I'm certain that you can build software to some specification without ever agreeing to the spec text's licence, and that a CC-BY licenced spec doesn't limit any implementing system's licence. Even so, CC-BY is permissive and you could include CC-BY content in a, say, GPL project. You just need to include both licences.
    - bdon 2y ago
      > I'm certain that you can build software to some specification without ever agreeing to the spec text's licence That is exactly the opposite of OMT's copyright interpretation: https://github.com/openmaptiles/openmaptiles?tab=readme-ov-file#license https://github.com/openmaptiles/openmaptiles?tab=readme-ov-f... > You just need to include both licences. That is the definition of license incompatibility as described in the Creative Commons documentation above. The license is open source and a good fit for if you are running a paid map SaaS or free service as an end product, but is not compatible with the open source ecosystem as a building block.