First of all, thank you for making this happen! This is one of the most significant developments in the history of OSM I believe.
Moreover, as someone who dig deep into the situation of schemas/styles (I made https://openfreemap.org/), I believe this will give the much needed push for a post-OpenMapTiles ecosystem, finally based on a real open-source license.
The OpenMapTiles / MapTiler “hidden-fork” situation is really not nice. MapTiler has been deviating more and more from the OMT repo, which is in a very abandoned state. No one wants to invest in it, because of the license.
Currently, both Shortbread and Versa needs a lot of work to be on feature parity with the mature OpenMapTiles ecosystem, but I believe OSM.org embracing it will give that push.
I’d personally like to have OpenFreeMap one day be based on Shortbread + Versa, finally embracing a truly open-source, community led vector tile ecosystem.
Having said that, the big question is where will this coordination happen. Also, OSM should really clarify the situation of using Versa styles on OSM.org in my opinion. Currently I made a JSON compare and only the paths are changed, everything else is identical at the moment. Also confirmed here.
But at one point OSM might deviate/fork Versa as OSM users might want different use cases compared to “vanilla” Versa.
I mean where will the development of Versa + tightly coupled Shortbread happen in the future?
In Versa? In Shortbread? In GitHub - openstreetmap/vectortile-website?
Currently users are opening issues in Versa about issues seen on OSM.org:
Broken Arabic/Hebrew · Issue #64 · versatiles-org/versatiles-style · GitHub
TLDR:
- OSM embracing Shortbread + Versa is an amazing development.
- There should be a place where tightly coupled Shortbread + Versa development can happen. One repo, one team, one place to open issues and discuss them.