Originally published at https://osmbuildings.org on 2018–01–03
It seems unreal but Mapzen is closing business.
Is it just 4 years? Regarding tools, presence and influence on OSM Community.
I’m especially glad to have met and discussed with Brett, Peter R. and Patrizio.
Also Mapzen’s services will halt by January 31st, which is very short notice to many clients. Their remain available as open source so you can continue using them or set up your own services.
Update 2019–03–24: Since January 2019 Mapzen is a Linux foundation project.
Alternatives
We’ve known Cesium since we started OSM Buildings all the way back in 2012. Cesium likewise have been aware of us since the beginning — we grew up together as colleagues in a common market. They got the 3D globe, we got the OSM data. They got 3D tiles, we got the nice buildings.
This all worked fine until one day in June 2020 when we received notice of OpenStreetMap Foundation’s (OSMF) decision to grant Cesium the trademark “Cesium OSM Buildings”.
This was a surprising move, to say the least. Our OSM Buildings project has served the community for a much longer period of time and is well known to the OSMF. Granting a trademark to a commercial service that includes our project name — letter by letter, exactly copying character cases — should have at least raised some questions. …
Just saw this tweet asking for QGIS 3d funding again. It already caused a brief discussion, started by me.
Wise words from Steve Gifford (@mousebirdc) calmed me down:
“ Honestly should probably have just used @CesiumJS. Sure, it’s web tech, but it’s already there.
But really, and I say this with no malice, people always want to write their own 3D rendering engine. So they do.”
It helped to remember OSM Buildings was not the first solution visualising OSM data in 3D as well. If everyone has the right to reinvent the wheel, what is the issue?
Asking for people’s money should require an evaluation of alternatives.
This is where I draw a red line.
Originally published at https://osmbuildings.org on 2018–03–01
