News

November month has seen a lot of updates from across different projects in Maplibre ecosystem. From mulitple pre-releases for MapLibre GL JS and to groundbreaking udpates in Maplibre Native, there’s a lot to explore.

Dec 1, 2024 · 5 minutes read

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.

Nov 12, 2024 · 1 minutes read

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.

Nov 5, 2024 · 3 minutes read

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.

Oct 11, 2024 · 3 minutes read

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.

Oct 4, 2024 · 2 minutes read

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! MapLibre GL JS In this month three versions were released: 4.7.0, 4.7.1 and 5.0.0-pre.1.

Sep 30, 2024 · 4 minutes read

We are glad to open the August newsletter with a cordial THANK YOU to Radar for continuing to sponsor MapLibre in 2024! MapLibre Governing Board Election At the end of August, the MapLibre Governing Board election 2024 took place. The following people have been elected:

Sep 2, 2024 · 4 minutes read

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:

Aug 30, 2024 · 3 minutes read

Jawg Maps continues to support MapLibre in 2024 - Thank You! MapLibre Governing Board Election 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.

Jul 31, 2024 · 6 minutes read

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.

Jun 30, 2024 · 4 minutes read

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.

Jun 28, 2024 · 1 minutes read

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! MapLibre Tile Format - MLT In a monthly MapLibre meeting several months ago, Markus Tremmel presented his research on a new vector tile format and how it might outperform conventional Mapbox Vector Tiles (MVT). Microsoft has now contracted Stamen for a proof of concept that will focus on tile size benchmarks and JavaScript decoding performance.

May 31, 2024 · 5 minutes read

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!

Apr 30, 2024 · 4 minutes read

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.

Mar 26, 2024 · 1 minutes read

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.

Mar 25, 2024 · 2 minutes read

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.

Feb 29, 2024 · 3 minutes read

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.

Feb 20, 2024 · 1 minutes read

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.

Jan 30, 2024 · 2 minutes read

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.

Jan 19, 2024 · 2 minutes read

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.

Dec 30, 2023 · 3 minutes read

MapLibre GL JS v4 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.

Nov 30, 2023 · 4 minutes read

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.

Nov 8, 2023 · 1 minutes read

MapLibre GL JS 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!

Oct 30, 2023 · 4 minutes read

Governing Board Elections 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.

Sep 18, 2023 · 4 minutes read

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!

Aug 30, 2023 · 1 minutes read

Highlights Governing Board Elections 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.

Aug 26, 2023 · 3 minutes read

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:

Aug 11, 2023 · 2 minutes read

Governing Board Elections 2023 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.

Aug 2, 2023 · 1 minutes read

Highlights COVTiles We want to emphasize Markus Tremmel’s input of prototyping a new vector tile format called COVTiles. MapLibre Native Harfbuzz Alan Wei Chen has shared a demo using Harfbuzz to render complex text. Check out #1439.

Jul 30, 2023 · 3 minutes read

Highlights JawgMaps 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!

Jun 23, 2023 · 4 minutes read

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.

Jun 22, 2023 · 1 minutes read

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.

Jun 7, 2023 · 5 minutes read

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.

May 23, 2023 · 4 minutes read

Highlights Mierune We would like to thank our first sponsor Mierune for their continued trust in MapLibre. MapLibre Innovation Lab 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.

May 16, 2023 · 4 minutes read

Highlights 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 released version 2.0.0 of the Android Navigation library. Big thanks to Robin Boldt and everyone who helped with this! Read the news announcement…

Apr 14, 2023 · 4 minutes read

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.

Apr 6, 2023 · 1 minutes read

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.

Mar 27, 2023 · 2 minutes read

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.

Mar 24, 2023 · 1 minutes read

General Bounty Program 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.

Mar 20, 2023 · 5 minutes read

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.

Mar 13, 2023 · 2 minutes read

General 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 React Native has been published. Thanks Ian, Luke, and Jérôme for contributing this package. Read more here.

Feb 16, 2023 · 5 minutes read

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.

Feb 8, 2023 · 1 minutes read

If you speak Japanese and you are interested in map rendering, have a look at the newly created MapLibre User Group Japan. Official Website X Space Yasunori Kirimoto and Kanahiro Iguchi who are both MapLibre Voting Members are organizing the User Group. The plan is to create online meetups and bring people together who are interested in MapLibre. They also have some nice MapLibre swag for you!

Jan 23, 2023 · 1 minutes read

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.

Jan 20, 2023 · 3 minutes read

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!

Jan 16, 2023 · 2 minutes read

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.

Jan 16, 2023 · 1 minutes read

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!

Jan 12, 2023 · 1 minutes read

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!

Jan 11, 2023 · 1 minutes read

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.

Jan 4, 2023 · 3 minutes read

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…

Jan 3, 2023 · 2 minutes read