Add DPG: Terrastories

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[nathanbaleeta]

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[nathanbaleeta]

FYI - Terrastories is powered by Mapbox, a proprietary library. Requested project owners to prove independence from the proprietary library by providing open functional alternatives which can be used without significant changes to the core product. Thanks.

[nathanbaleeta]

The project's last version v1.1-2022, still depends on Mapbox GL. It seems that should be possible to use an open tile server, but I'm not sure how hard it is. See Map content: https://github.com/Terrastories/terrastories/blob/v1.1-2022/documentation/CUSTOMIZATION.md#map-content

Note: when using Mapbox.com maps with Terrastories, you are subject to Mapbox's pricing schema which has a free tier of up to 50,000 map loads per month. [...]

Should we wait for the project to finish the major refactor ? Perhaps is a good time to abstract away the Map provider and make it possible to use a different tiler.

According to the team at Terrastories:

• For offline usage, we are using TileServer to serve the maps; they just switched to MapLibre GL for the map engine, which is an open-source fork of the latest version of Mapbox that was under a non-restrictive license, as you might know about https://github.com/maptiler/tileserver-gl/releases/tag/v4.1.1
• For online usage, we are currently using a Ruby gem mapbox-gl-rails (https://github.com/Terrastories/terrastories/blob/c656c4d42a69ca46a46d4d91b85889a0890a1656/rails/Gemfile#L102) which uses the latest version of Mapbox GL JS, currently 2.9.0 - https://github.com/nbulaj/mapbox-gl-rails. Once the MapLibre project evolves and there is a rendering engine available and easy to integrate into Rails, we will switch over to that for online usage. But a user may still choose to use their Mapbox.com map.

Reference: https://www.geoapify.com/mapbox-gl-new-license-and-6-free-alternatives

Cc: @iperdomo

[nathanbaleeta]

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