[OSM-talk] Mapzen is shutting down

[Tobias Zwick]

Hey guys

Some of you already read it on weekly, Mapzen is shutting down. This is
very sad news for the new year, as they were working on many promising
open-source services around OpenStreetMap.
I don't have the best overview, but their main product was the vector
map, so amongst the most important projects were

+ tangram and tangram ES (GL vector maps for web, embedded, mobile etc)
  https://github.com/tangrams

+ vector-datasource (Vector tile service)
  https://github.com/tilezen

+ Valhalla (routing engine)
  https://github.com/valhalla

+ Pelias (geocoder)
  https://github.com/pelias/pelias/

(did I forget anything?)

With the company being in dissolution and the developers forced to find
other jobs, all the work done in the last few years might be for the
birds if these repositories will no longer maintained.

I read we do not have to worry about the Valhalla team and project, they
found a new home at MapBox.

Also, I read today that the maintainers of Pelias announced this week,
that they will not shut it down. Full statement here:
https://github.com/pelias/pelias/tree/master/announcements/2018-01-02-pelias-update

But the future of Mapzen's main product, both the vector tile server and
tangram is what I am worried for. With Mapzen's tile services shutting
down along with everything else, the demos [1] will not work anymore and
people who want to use tangram will need to set up an own tileserver for
that, which is something the fewest would do with the easy alternative,
MapBox (and others? Or are there no more other competitors?).

Perhaps some people from the team/company are on this list and can share
their view on how or if these projects can continue and maybe how we as
a community could help.

Greetings
Tobias

P.S: Not sure if I should post this also on the dev mailinglist?

[1] http://tangrams.github.io/tangram/