On Wed, Aug 6, 2014 at 3:52 PM, Hanno Schlichting <[email protected]>
wrote:

> The “dot cloud” consists of map tiles generated and hosted by Mozilla. I’d
> consider these tiles to be public domain data and they don't need any
> copyright information.
>

Unfortunately, it can be a bit tricky to put a work in the public domain,
and doing so tends to require an actual grant or release.  Wikipedia has
some info on it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Granting_work_into_the_public_domain

The recommendation there is to use a CC0 license to have the desired effect.


> From my point of view, as Mozilla we want to use our commercial mapbox
> contract only in apps and webpages that we publish ourselves. Primarily
> because we need some way to ensure that the map tiles are only used for the
> intended purpose.
>
> We specifically don’t want to get into the business of hosting the world
> base map, as that’s an area where there is already a wide variety of choice
> out there, both in terms of hosting map tiles yourself as well as different
> vendors, for example http://switch2osm.org/providers/


> In an ideal world, there would be a HTML5 “map” element, which would allow
> you to render a map and let the operating system handle the fetching and
> offline caching of map tiles. And instead of each app developer, each OS or
> user could choose the base map provider they wanted. But unfortunately we
> aren’t there yet.
>

Why is it that Mozilla doesn't want to get into the business of hosting the
world base map?  Though there's a wide variety of choice out there, as you
noted there would be advantages to creating combined tiles for the purposes
of stumbling.  There are other places that I could see a base map being
very useful, especially in FirefoxOS.  An HTML5 "map" element would have to
acquire the tiles from somewhere, and why should Mozilla not be an option
for that?

Having one map provider for Mozilla built binaries and a different provider
for community built binaries bothers me a bit, and feels like it goes
against the ethos (as I understand it) of Mozilla.


> The map style is based on Mozilla’s corporate identity and style guide (
> https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/styleguide/websites/community/overview/).
> We currently don’t follow the style guide for the stumbling app, but we do
> for the website.
>

What parts of the stumbling app do you feel should be altered to better
reflect Mozilla's style guide?  That page only seemed to indicate Tabzilla
and the Open Sans Light font, but I don't think either are used for Fennec
(though I could be wrong).  A Tabzilla-like feature would be more work, but
we could change the font if required.  Are there any other elements that
would be worth examining?

Cheers,
Kevin.
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