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.

We’re delighted to begin the October newsletter with a gracious and hearty Thank You to Meta for their unwavering support as a sponsor of MapLibre in 2024! We look forward to what is to come.

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.

We’re delighted to begin the September newsletter with a heartfelt THANK YOU to Microsoft for their unwavering support as a sponsor of MapLibre in 2024!

We are glad to open the August newsletter with a cordial THANK YOU to Radar for continuing to sponsor MapLibre in 2024!

At the end of August, the MapLibre Governing Board election 2024 took place. The following people have been elected:

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:

Jawg Maps continues to support MapLibre in 2024 - Thank You!

The MapLibre Governing Board 2024 election will take place on Thursday, August 29th, 2024. The Governing Board consists of 5 members which get elected by the MapLibre Voting Members. The primary role of the Board is to set the long-term strategy of MapLibre, overview MapLibre’s finances, communicate with sponsors, and oversee MapLibre’s team members. Under normal circumstances, the Governing Board does not engage in technical decisions in the MapLibre codebases. However, should there be an otherwise unresolvable conflict, the Board will have the last word and serves as a last instance in case of a dispute. The Governing Board has quarterly internal meetings as well as quarterly meetings with sponsors.

We would like to open the June newsletter by thanking komoot for their continued support as a member of the MapLibre Sponsorship Program!

In June 2024, we were also happy to welcome Mapme as a new Silver tier sponsor, see announcement.

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.

Mierune, our first-ever sponsor, has made a donation again to support MapLibre in 2024 for the third year in a row. Thank you so much Mierune!

At the end of March, we were happy to announce that Mappedin, a global leader in indoor mapping and spatial data management, joined the MapLibre Sponsorship Program. Let us give a warm welcome to our latest sponsor Mappedin!

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.

In March 2024, we onboarded maplibre-gl-inspect into the MapLibre GitHub organization. MapLibre GL Inspect is a small plugin for MapLibre GL JS that allows you to inspect the contents of vector tiles including the attributes of vector tile features. Special thanks to Andrew Calcutt who maintained this plugin over the last years and made sure it works with MapLibre GL JS.

In February 2024, we were happy to announce that Microsoft has joined the MapLibre Sponsorship Program. With Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft we now have three companies that have a seat in the MapLibre Advisory Council which meets with members of the MapLibre Governing Board on a quarterly basis.

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.

A lot of great things happened this January: Maputnik, Metal, new releases of MapLibre Native Node bindings and Martin, and hopefully our last prerelease of MapLibre GL JS v4 all appeared this month.

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.

MapLibre wishes you all the best for 2024! https://demotiles.maplibre.org

2023 was an interesting year for MapLibre. It was the first time that we had paid maintainers who took care of MapLibre GL JS and MapLibre Native. Harel Mazor and Bart Louwers are the main people who served in this role and thanks to their great effort, contributing to MapLibre was faster and smoother than ever before.

Versions 3.5.2, 3.6.0, 3.6.1 were released, and we started going into the pre-release mode for MapLibre GL JS v4. The most significant breaking change in version 4 will be the replacement of outdated JavaScript callbacks with Promises in several public APIs.

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.

Just in time for this newsletter, MapLibre GL JS has gained over 5000 Stars on GitHub. Great that we got so far and thanks to everyone who contributed in the past and made this possible!

It is already one year now that MapLibre has an elected Governing Board, and as the Board members serve a one-year-term, it was time for new Governing Board Elections. We held the Elections and all existing Board members have been re-elected. Read more here.

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!

We want to thank each and every of our 92 (49 new!) Voting Members for their vote and are looking forward to a next great year with our vibrant community. The result of the election will be published separately next week.

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 want to emphasize Markus Tremmel’s input of prototyping a new vector tile format called COVTiles.

Alan Wei Chen has shared a demo using Harfbuzz to render complex text. Check out #1439.

We would like to thank JawgMaps for their trust. As you might have read in our previous announcement, JawgMaps has joined the MapLibre Sponsorship Program and supports us as a Silver Sponsor!

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.

It is finally time for a new maplibre-rs monthly! Or should I say yearly? The last update was 2022 and we already have 2023! The development of maplibre-rs did not come to a total standstill, even though it may look like it did.

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 would like to thank our first sponsor Mierune for their continued trust in MapLibre.

Many real-world applications have been built with MapLibre. As suggested here it is about bringing the Community together. Implementing new ideas is what will make MapLibre thrive further. We want to recognize all of your efforts, collectively, and so decided to expand on the idea of the MapLibre Innovation Lab - stay tuned.

Komoot joined the MapLibre Sponsorship Program as a Silver Sponsor. Welcome komoot, we are glad to have you in the MapLibre community! Read the news announcement…

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 invite you to share feedback on what features and improvements in MapLibre GL JS and MapLibre Native would be helpful for you. Tell us what you need and vote for the things which are most important to you following these feedback instructions.

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.

We have successfully registered the MapLibre trademark in the US and in the EU. Open Source Collective, our fiscal host, holds the MapLibre trademarks.

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!

We had our first monthly meeting of 2023. You find the meeting notes here.

Feel free to join our next monthly meeting on Wednesday, Feb 8th, 2023. The technical steering committee meetings are open to everyone!

Considering that MapLibre is an open-source fork of the Mapbox rendering library, many of the Mapbox plugins can be used in conjunction with MapLibre without any issue in JavaScript. However, since MapLibre is a TypeScript library in the same spirit, if you wish to use some of the popular Mapbox plugins in your TypeScript application you will likely run into the TypeScript compiler throwing a lot of type inference errors. This is because these plugins were developed with Mapbox solely in mind.

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…

maplibre-rs is an upcoming and cross-platform vector map renderer written in Rust. If you want to get in touch with the developers, visit the #maplibre:matrix.org chat or join the MapLibre (#maplibre and #maplibre-rs) community within the OpenStreetMap Slack. You can get an invitation here.