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Comment by bdon | Hacker News Reader

Hi, the value add in the commercial offering on top of raw OSM is described here:

https://protomaps.com/docs/faq#openstreetmap

I also maintain open source tooling for anyone to replicate and extract OSM on-demand, as well as a free download portal:

https://github.com/protomaps/OSMExpress

https://app.protomaps.com/downloads

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Interesting!

I note that:

> OpenStreetMap ... standard tile layer ... openstreetmap-carto ... is based on dynamic rendering of raster images, instead of vector tiles that can be customized on the client.

so, does OSM really not make vector tiles available? That's too bad.

OSM is really a dataset. They do offer a raster tile server, but it's intended to support community mapping (improving the dataset), and not necessarily for end users using a map for other purposes.

Basically they want you to host your own tile server using the OSM dataset. There are also commercial offerings that do this for you, but not for free.

Tiles, vector or raster, to be consumed for general use are not really in the scope of the OpenStreetMap project. This is surprising to many because it's the first thing you see on OSM.org; the tiles there are for the explicit purpose of feedback to data editors, and make a best-effort to synchronize the instantaneous state of the database in the tiles, unlike Protomaps which delivers a snapshot.

Paul Norman has a project called Tilekiln to adapt vector rendering for this use case on OSM.org: https://github.com/pnorman/tilekiln

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