We’d like to share a recent update regarding our team at MapLibre. Meena, who has been our Head of Marketing and Fundraising, has transitioned out of her role. We’re grateful for her efforts in fostering connections within our community and with our sponsors. We wish her well in her future endeavors.

Two years ago, MapLibre announced that Oliver would become the first person to work on the MapLibre team in the capacity of coordinator. Oliver has been involved with the project before that, being the reviewer of the now legendary TypeScript migration PR for MapLibre GL JS, one of the first major milestones after the fork.

Three new people have joined the MapLibre Team. Please give them a warm welcome!

Isaac Besora has joined MapLibre as Graphics Engineer. His initial focus will be improvements in MapLibre GL JS in particular in the areas of Terrain 3D and the new Globe feature. Isaac brings expertise in graphics programming into the MapLibre Organization which is a central skill to what we are doing.

The MapLibre Governing Board members serve for a one year term and at the end of August we hold the Board election with representatives of the community, the MapLibre Voting Members. Yesterday, on Thursday, Aug 29th, 2024, the election poll closed and the following people were elected to the Board:

Mapme joins the MapLibre Sponsorship Program as a Silver Sponsor.

The Silver tier donation of USD 10,000 will be used for general maintenance of the MapLibre codebases and project coordination.

Mappedin joins the MapLibre Sponsorship Program at the Silver tier.

With a yearly donation of USD $10,000, Mappedin supports the maintenance of MapLibre’s codebases and ensures a stable future for the project.

Microsoft joins the MapLibre Sponsorship Program as a Silver Sponsor.

The Silver tier donation of USD 80,000 will be used to 20 percent for development of new features and to 80 percent for general maintenance of the MapLibre codebases and project coordination.

We are excited to announce the release of MapLibre Native for iOS v6.0.0 with Metal support!

MapLibre Native is a map rendering toolkit written in C++ that can be used on many different platforms. For GPU accelerated real-time rendering, MapLibre Native traditionally relied only on the industry standard graphics API called OpenGL ES. However, in 2018 Apple announced that it would be phasing out OpenGL ES on all Apple platforms in favor of Metal. This put MapLibre at risk of being unusable on Apple devices in the case that OpenGL ES support should be discontinued. With the new Metal rendering backend we are no longer exposed to this risk and users will benefit from the advantages of a state-of-the-art graphics framework.

Meta continues to support MapLibre and increases its donation from the Silver to the Gold tier in its second year of sponsorship.

The Gold tier donation of USD 150,000 will be used to 25 percent for development of new features and to 75 percent for general maintenance of the MapLibre codebases and project coordination.

The MapLibre Governing Board Elections are finished - all existing Board members have been reelected.

MapLibre Governing Board 2023

Birk Skyum

Harel Mazor

Luke Seelenbinder

Petr Pridal

Yuri Astrakhan

Congratulations to the elected Board members and a big thank you to Jonah Adkins for running for the Board as the only newcomer!

Radar is joining the MapLibre Sponsorship Program as a Silver Sponsor.

Tim Julien, CTO at Radar, was so kind to share a few insights into Radar and its relationship to MapLibre below:

The Governing Board Elections 2023 will take place August 24th, 2023. We want to emphasize the process of nominating Candidates for the Governing Board as well as new Voting Members and are looking forward to your suggestions.

We are happy to announce that JawgMaps has joined the MapLibre Sponsorship Program and supports us as a Silver Sponsor!

The JawgMaps platform provides enterprise-grade mapping services built from both OpenSource and proprietary tools, as well as OpenStreetMap data. Far from simply being a map customizing tool, Jawg provides you with statistics that enable you to adapt your product according to the needs of your users.

This release is a big step for MapLibre GL JS! With more than 500 commits, and almost a year in the making, version 3.0.0 is surely our best release yet. Lots of features, performance improvement, bug fixes and a few potentially breaking changes that were necessary, to keep the project healthy, are to be found here.

We are happy to announce that komoot has joined the MapLibre Sponsorship Program and supports us as a Silver Sponsor!

Komoot is an app that lets you find, plan, and share adventures with its easy route planner. Driven by a love for nature, and powered by the outdoor community’s recommendations, komoot helps you explore more of the great outdoors—wherever and however you want.

We just released version 2.0.0 of MapLibre’s navigation library. The update comes with the latest version of MapLibre Native (10.0.2) and includes a navigation UI by default.

MapLibre Navigation Android is an open source navigation library which allows everyone to build a customized navigation experience on Android. You can easily integrate a lot of different tiles, as you are used to from MapLibre Native. You can integrate your own routing backend, OSRM and GraphHopper (using the /navigate endpoint) are easy to implement. You can build your own navigation UI. An example implementation of such a custom implementation can be found in the Kurviger App.

The Metal project team has started working! The goal is to deliver a Metal beta release for MapLibre Native by the end of 2023.

AWS and Meta are teaming up in this effort because they both recognize the importance of Metal as a modern graphics backend on Apple devices.

We are happy to invite you to a second round of voting on Bounty directions. Please let us know which features would be helpful for you and upvote existing suggestions.

MapLibre has completed onboarding of MapLibre React Native, an SDK that will make MapLibre Native more accessible to mobile developers.

The project is a fork of rnmapbox, a community-maintained React Native library for building maps with the Mapbox iOS and Android SDKs. The original project supported both Mapbox and MapLibre backends for some time, but as the MapLibre SDK has developed independently over time, supporting both became onerous. A clean break enables both projects to bring improvements and bug fixes from the native SDKs to React Native developers as quickly as possible.

If you speak Japanese and you are interested in map rendering, have a look at the newly created MapLibre User Group Japan.

The MapLibre Bounty Program will support the following cross-project directions: Terrain3D, globe view, documentation, performance, Brahmic/Indic scripts, MapLibre Innovation Lab.

We invited the broader community to give feedback and share ideas for cross-project directions in a discussion group on GitHub.

We are happy to share that we were able to contract Harel Mazor, the long-time lead-maintainer of MapLibre GL JS, for the Maintainer Web role. Please give him a warm welcome!

With Ovidiu Voda starting today, we are proud to now have two people working as Maintainers on MapLibre Native. Please give Ovi a warm welcome!

Ovi is going to work together with Bart Louwers on Native and he is looking forward to meeting everyone involved in the project. Feel free to reach out to Ovi and say hi to him.

Alan Wei Chen from GrabMaps is giving a talk about how Grab renders text labels in the Khmer language using FreeType and HarfBuzz in the next MapLibre Eastern Call. Feel free to join the presentation!

Today, Bart Louwers is starting to work with MapLibre in the Maintainer Native role. Let’s give him a warm welcome!

Bart is excited to meet the people involved in the project and learn more about the codebase and the community behind it. Feel free to reach out to Bart and say hello to him…

If you have ideas for new features which you would love to see from MapLibre, you can now share your idea and tell us that we should allocate Bounties for it. Bounties are pre-defined cash prizes for development tasks.

We thank all our sponsors for their generous financial support and assistance in building the MapLibre Organization.

We were successful in securing initial funding and would now like to pay people from the community for coordination, maintenance, and development work.

The MapLibre Governing Board selected Oliver Wipfli to work as Coordinator of the MapLibre Organization. Oliver did this very well until now in his free time, and we need immediate action.

On Thursday, Aug 25th, 2022, the MapLibre Voting Members elected for the first time a Governing Board and they approved the MapLibre Charter. We thank all the candidates and Voting Members for participating in this process!

We are pleased to announce that Meta now is a sponsor of the MapLibre Organization. Thanks for your generous help and for all the trust you put in us!

Meta has been involved in the MapLibre Organization since the very beginning, helped setting up the initial fork, and provided guidance on non-trivial questions around licensing.

We are pleased to announce the Amazon Web Services (AWS) support for the MapLibre Organization as a Platinum Sponsor. Thanks for your generous support and for all the trust you put in us!

Recently, MIERUNE Inc. from Japan decided to support MapLibre financially with a generous donation of USD 10'000, see https://opencollective.com/maplibre. This is the largest ammount that MapLibre has received to date.

Thank you MIERUNE Inc., we are very proud that you trust MapLibre and support us!