I've been an avid Mapbox user since getting alpha access to Tilemill. From my perspective, this is the most important contribution to the open mapping space since the introduction of vector tiles and Mapbox GL / Map GL. Mapbox in my opinion left the door open in how they approached tile baking with MTS. While powerful it was way to confusing and expensive. While you could always bake tiles with Tippecanoe you still had to struggle with vector tile hosting hosting. With PMTIles vector tile hosting is arguably easier, more convenient and an order of magnitude cheaper then going with Mapbox (especially if you don't need fancy projection / 3d support and are ok with MapLibre). Felt is one of the major services that I believe uses the PMTile approach behind the scenes and they won't be the last. (Notably: they have continued to invest in Tippecanoe which is awesome). With Mapbox focus shifting, it appears, to car navigation - it's great to see disruptive innovation coming from new places. Even more amazing that is has come from a one person team.
Also to note, the emergence of PMTiles coincides DuckDB spatial query support will unlock a lot of innovation. The ability to query and process large geoparquet files and quickly stream them into baked PMTiles unlocks a lot of really compelling use cases.
Mapbox is still the best choice where a polished suite of mapping APIs is a better fit for a project.
Mapbox is a venture-backed company with a SaaS business model, and has never been open source in total - it used to be open core with a FOSS frontend and proprietary backend. This SaaS model is absolutely the best way to fund huge companies and give investors a return. Mapbox has also done the bulk of innovation in open source web mapping over the past 10 years - the Protomaps project uses MapLibre (fork of Mapbox GL 1.0) and the MVT tile format. Both required teams of full-time developers - easily tens of millions in salaries and stock - and they have given away version 1.0 for free as a gift, even though 2.0 is not open source.
The ideal software economy is one in which innovators capture a good portion of the wealth they create. This is why it's important for Protomaps to focus on use cases underserved by SaaS, instead of just being a cheaper map API. The sibling comment on wildfire mapping https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37989059 is a good example of the applications I want the project to support.
> The ideal software economy is one in which innovators capture a good portion of the wealth they create.
Beg to differ, the ideal software economies maximally empowers end-users at the absolute minimal cost. Innovators can and should leave substantial cash on the table. They should see themselves as stewards of a public good.
Ideal software economy would be all free (as in freedom) software. The current economy is hugely wasteful with lots of redundant work and generally bad outcomes.
Private ownership economy doesn't work for zero marginal cost products even in theory. It's a huge waste of our resources and a big hinderance to progress.
Also to note, the emergence of PMTiles coincides DuckDB spatial query support will unlock a lot of innovation. The ability to query and process large geoparquet files and quickly stream them into baked PMTiles unlocks a lot of really compelling use cases.