I remember looking at that fork when the whole licencing thing went down a couple of years ago, but it was unclear how much, if any support it would have. Looks like the project is doing ok.
Like many others no doubt, I invested heavily into the mapbox-gl-js library (pre 2.0). I was able to build amazing value on top of that library including a routing voice navigation app for an aged care facility that is used to this day 24/7/365. It was a very sad day when they changed their licencing model to lock in vendors and I had to walk away from that investment of my time and effort. Luckily I had also worked and contributed to OpenLayers and Leaflet, so with significant effort was able to move my clients to those platforms.
I guess we now have some more insight into why this occurred.
> "In order to use most Services, you must register for or authenticate into a Mapbox account. When you use our application program interfaces (APIs), including our SDK Registry/Downloads API, each request to an API must include one of your account's unique API keys."
We should ask the long term question, what if QGIS and other FLOSS products had broad support and significant resources flowing into them that ESRI has?
The way I think about it, often the same people, certainly people with the similar skillsets are working on all these products, most of them just follow the money.
I think one big missing piece of the puzzle for governments to assess these products is a governance and risk model associated with these products. But software engineers generally don't give a crap about governance, so we need more people who do care about that to invest in OSS. I'm seeing some movement on this like the Github Sponsors initiative.
Stay away from ESRI (ess-ray) - I should get that printed on a t-shirt.
ESRI centralise power, lock you into their technology, and IMHO a digital twin should be doing the opposite. Don't believe the sales BS about ESRI having "free" software, read the fine print, ArcGIS AINT FREE.
IMHO a Digital Twin should be something for the people, by the people! So please stop paying proprietary systems like ESRI and incentivising them to stifle innovation and increases barriers to entry.
If you want to see local jobs, growth and innovation then invest in OpenSource software like OSM (Open Street Map) and QGIS and other Open GIS products.
I see these articles a lot, and always wonder why people go it alone. Can anyone link to a discussion about a distributed community run firewall? Does such a thing exist? If so, please comment.
Next step is to figure out how to transfer the value generated by the consumers to the value created by the contributors... maybe crypto services like https://www.algorand.com/ ?
Government has been sold on the "Hobbes" vision of society and believes an assertion of authority is necessary in order to prevent civil chaos. They will never give money directly to people until this changes. https://issuepedia.org/Hobbes_vs._Rousseau
I looked into vending machines many years ago and the overheads were massive. Insurance, maintenance, local government approvals, stocking, supply chain issues, vandalism, and the list goes on and on... it is a business where you must scale. You need to be running a fleet of vending machines to make it worth the hassle. There are some interesting companies tackling some of these issues in the IoT space.
My 2 cents... generally a product is something that has value to others... so, think about that first. Why is your product valuable to others? Explain your product to at least one person who is not invested in the process that would buy your product if it existed. Ask them lots of questions about why they would buy your product. Would their friends buy your product? Why? Can you pre-sell your product before you even start building it? You get the idea... sell first, build after. Sell a little, build a little, repeat.
@bdon Awesome! The geospatial industry is in need of simpler tooling for specific jobs such as generating tilesets.
Currently complex tools such as QGIS and GDAL do everything, but the learning curve is very steep.
An addon you might consider a feature to drop an image (and adjust it to fit) over the OSM data to generate a XYZ tilesets directly on the customer AWS S3 (or equivalent storage).
This might be a good way to monetise your offering... I know my customers would buy it.
I must be missing something here... is the article suggesting by going to evil.com it somehow has access to the auth cookies of bank.com?? If that is the case then you are screwed. CORS isn't going to save you.