The New Stack Podcast5 Des 2024

MapLibre: How a Fork Became a Thriving Open Source Project

When open source projects shift to proprietary licensing, forks and new communities often emerge. Such was the case with MapLibre, born from Mapbox’s 2020 decision to make its map rendering engine proprietary. In conjunction with All Things Open 2024, Seth Fitzsimmons, a principal engineer at AWS and Tarus Balog, principal technical strategist for open source at AWS shared that this engine, popular for its WebGL-powered vector maps and dynamic customization features, was essential for organizations like BMW, The New York Times, and Instacart. However, Mapbox’s move disappointed its open-source user base by tying the upgraded Mapbox GL JS library to proprietary products.

In response, three users forked the engine to create MapLibre, committing to modernizing and preserving its open-source ethos. Despite challenges—forking often struggles to sustain momentum—MapLibre has thrived, supported by contributors and corporate sponsors like AWS, Meta, and Microsoft. Notably, a community member transitioned the project from JavaScript to TypeScript over nine months, showcasing the dedication of unpaid contributors.

Thanks to financial backing, MapLibre now employs maintainers, enabling it to reciprocate community efforts while fostering equality among participants. The project illustrates the resilience of open-source communities when proprietary shifts occur.

Learn more from The New Stack about forking open source projects:

Why Do Open Source Projects Fork?

OpenSearch: How the Project Went From Fork to Foundation

Join our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(300)

Why MotherDuck refuses to fork DuckDB

At a recent MCP developer summit, The New Stack spoke with Till Döhmen, AI lead atMotherDuck, about the company’s growing role in the evolving DuckDB ecosystem. Backed by investors includingTomasz Tun...

27 Mai 27min

JetBrains is selling independence as the rest of AI coding picks sides

JetBrains is positioning itself as the last major independent AI coding-tool vendor in a market increasingly tied to hyperscalers and foundation model labs. Speaking at Google Cloud Next, JetBrains VP...

21 Mai 26min

Why Block handed Goose to the Linux Foundation

What began as an internal developer tool atBlockhas evolved into a broader open-source initiative with industry backing. Goose, Block’s AI coding agent, followed a path similar to Amazon’s transformat...

15 Mai 19min

Fivetran's CPO: closed data stacks won't survive the agent era

At Google Cloud Next 2026, Fivetran Chief Product Officer Anjan Kundavaram argued that enterprise data systems are unprepared for the scale of AI-driven analytics. Unlike humans, AI agents can generat...

13 Mai 22min

The new FinOps problem isn't cloud bills

At Google Cloud Next 2026, Finout co-founder and CEO Roi Ravhon and Google Cloud FinOps lead Pathik Sharma discussed how FinOps is rapidly evolving for the AI era. Ravhon argued that while cloud FinOp...

12 Mai 28min

How Microsoft is governing thousands of Kubernetes clusters without manual intervention

Managing Kubernetes at fleet scale introduces significant complexity, especially as organizations expand from a few clusters to hundreds or thousands across cloud, on-premises, and edge environments. ...

7 Mai 25min

Why long-running AI agents break on HTTP and how Ably is fixing it

In this episode ofThe New Stack Makers, Matthew O’Riordan, CEO of Ably, explains how infrastructure originally built for human collaboration is now well-suited for long-running AI agents. While Ably i...

6 Mai 31min

Why the Linux Foundation adopted MCP, with Jim Zemlin and Mazin Gilbert

Agentic AI is advancing rapidly, with open-source projects racing to keep pace with real-world deployment. To accelerate progress, the Linux Foundation consolidated key technologies—Model Context Prot...

6 Mai 32min