We have good news! Mapzen is now a Linux Foundation project!

Mapzen the company may have shut down, but the open source tools that the services were based upon live on and continue to grow. As we noted back in 2015, the very premise of Mapzen was longevity:

One of the core tenets of Mapzen is that all our software and data must be open. This has been our guiding principle since the beginning, and as sure as all things must end, we will follow this through to our end (hopefully a hundred or more years from now… By building everything in the open we can build for real permanence, not just the short-lived permanence of a hot brand in this turbulent space.

We’re humbled to see so many people continuing to use our tools, but we also understand that some organizations need more reassurance and clarity. The Mapzen Diaspora decided to work with the Linux Foundation because it allows us to give the projects and intellectual property a clear legal framework. Note that no one is going to work for the Linux Foundation, nor does this mean that the Mapzen APIs are coming back — these had considerable infrastructure costs — but it does give us a place for fundraising to support the AWS, S3 and Github bills for the Tilezen vector tiles and Who’s On First data.

The work accomplished in past year shows that there’s a strong future for what we were lucky enough to be able to create. The tools and data continue to be used and updated, with thousands of PRs added in the past year.

We’ve also been making a few updates to this website — we are now directly pointing to each project’s documentation sources, and the blog posts are all up and continue to be interesting and useful. Also, come by and say hi on Twitter!

header image: Stick Navigation Chart (Marshall Islands), Before 1950, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum