Placemark is now fully open source

Context: Placemark is a tool that lets you view, create, and edit geospatial (map) data. I ran it as a company for a while and open sourced it when I shut down that company.

Yesterday Placemark got a pretty big PR from Birk Skyum, replacing its dependency on Mapbox GL JS with MapLibre, along with some other improvements. Birk is one of the cofounders of MapLibre and a generally prolific open-source contributor.

It's merged and live, and you can see it in action at placemark.io. This meant swapping out both the Mapbox frontend code as well as switching to a different tile service - we're now using OpenFreeMap for tiles, OpenMapTiles-based styles, openrouteservice for the routing drawing mode, and MapTiler for the satellite layer. Forks of Placemark no longer require a Mapbox API token to work, but they do require a MapTiler token to support Satellite tiles, and an openrouteservice token to do route-drawing.

The big upside here is that this makes Placemark cleanly open source: all of its dependencies have proper open source licenses like MIT, ISC, Apache-2.0, BSD-3-Clause, or similar. Mapbox GL's license is not open source and requires the developer to have a Mapbox account and follow their Terms of Service. So: you can now fork Placemark and build cleanly-licensed open source applications on its codebase. I recommend it!

You'll notice some visual changes: MapTiler's satellite sources and processing are different than Mapbox's, and the OpenFreeMap styles are a bit different. I hope that it's not a disruptive change for anyone relying on the tool.

Along with this, Birk removed the deck.gl dependency that had been bothering me for a few years, and swapped out the routing functionality for a more permissive provider. It was a really great contribution, and resolved an issue more than two years old. Great stuff, and much appreciated!

Previously

• Earlier this month, Placemark code got readopted into geojson.io, which was also very cool
• Rewind to the 2024 Placemark open source release post

1. Notes on the Mapbox / Maplibre history, for clarity.
2. Here's the full license list from pnpm license list.