Awesome news. I think Mapbox made a mistake when they started charging for using their open source library with non Mapbox maps. But it's good that MapLibre picked up the work. I migrated my project to MapLibre a long time ago. Still missing some plugins, but mostly works great.
At my day job we’re heavily invested in Leaflet for historical reasons, but toward the end of last year added Maplibre as a layer on top of it via the excellent https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-gl-leaflet. This has allowed us to begin transitioning gradually instead of being forced to jump all at once.
It’s hard to beat the simplicity of Leaflet, but neither it nor OpenLayers can handle Mapbox Vector Tiles in a performant enough manner, so Maplibre is the future for us.
I was not aware of Microsoft’s involvement. It’s great to see some big players using it too!
I maintain a small MVT rendering library for Leaflet - I'm overall satisfied with the performance on modern devices, but usually point greenfield projects at MapLibre instead, unless you need some very specific Leaflet plugin.
The learning curve is pretty steep on GIS stuff in general. But, I found maplibre to work well both pulling out events and pumping in data via PMTiles or GeoJson on my django+htmx stack.
My only major snag was debugging some nonsensical errors when I was testing pmtiles with maplibre on a webserver that didn’t support ranged requests.
MapLibre is an awesome project, but it has huge problems with 3D terrain. In my opinion the entire 3D "stack" needs to be completely rewritten in order to properly support terrain, because navigation panning/zooming is badly broken, where the devil is in the detail. At a first glance all seems OK, but when you really use it, you'll notice that it's pure chaos which leads to errors in navigation. Also overlaying images over terrain is broken. It's always terrain what causes the problem.
> Bing Maps deploys MapLibre GL JS in production, a feat which was only possible thanks to performance improvements that were contributed to MapLibre by Bing Maps Engineers.
Does anyone ever use Bing maps for anything?
Sometimes when I see a complaint about Apple/Google Maps I like to check Bing Maps for the same thing. I invariably find it's even worse, but nobody noticed because they didn't look.
They do occasionally have the best quality satellite maps though; nobody likes updating those because they're very expensive and generally the least useful mode.
The website and the PDF in the about give a general idea of the organization goals but I couldn't figure where are the actual tools and libraries or the source code. :/