Something I love about map making is how many ways there are to get started. You can draw one by hand (many of our maps start as a hand sketch), use a service like Google Maps and graphic design software to add your points of interest, doodle on top of a printed map and scan it in, the list can go on and on.
To make the kind of detailed maps we make we turn to GIS: Geographic Information Systems. There are a few different GIS options out there, Esri’s Arc is perhaps the most famous one. We primarily use QGIS because it’s open source software, and extremely capable as a professional GIS product. This means the users are free to use, dismantle, study, and distribute the software without any further explicit consent from the creators. To practice open source cartography, then, means we use as much open source software as we can as we create the end products we ship to you, and then give you the same freedoms when you buy a digital or physical good from us.
Open source mapmaking starts with the supply chain. We do most of our work on a Raspberry Pi 5, running Raspberry Pi OS — a special flavor of Debian Linux designed for the low-power hardware. If you’re predisposed to know what that means, you might think it sounds bonkers to run such powerful software on such a low-power machine. And you’d be right. There usually comes a time when we have to switch over to a MacBook Pro to finish the job. Our goal is to eventually consolidate on Linux laptops, but until then, we bust out the MacBook when the work puts too much demand on the Pi.
Why not just do all the work on the MacBook? It’s a little inefficient but it’s mostly because we like to use Linux as much as we can.
On the practical level, open source software is a licensing agreement. Open Source hardware capable of running a GUI desktop platform is difficult, but Raspberry Pi is a good, open, platform to start with. Over time we will likely upgrade hardware to a more suitable-for-desktop system like System76, Framework, or Tuxeo, which will allow us to do much more of our work on hardware designed to run the software we need.
All of this is what makes open source one of the greatest ideas in a generation.
For software:
- Raspberry Pi OS: A Debian based Linux distribution tuned specifically to the unique hardware constraints.
- GNOME: A Linux desktop environment that’s a skosh more complete than the Pi’s built-in. (Okay maybe more than a skosh.)
- QGIS, the open source GIS project, which does the lion’s share of the cartography work. To support it we rely on the open source or public domain licensing of data sets from sources like:
- The US and international governments: NASA, NOAA, US Census, USGS US Forest Service, Stats and Environment Canada, local data from cities, counties, and hyper-local non-profits.
- We pull data from and contribute data back to OpenStreetMap
- NGOs like: GEBCO, and HydroSHEDs
- Inkscape: This is a vector graphic editor we use to touch up the maps we make in QGIS’s print layout mode before laying them out for publishing.
- WordPress powers the website you’re reading now, and WooCommerce powers our store.
- Yubikeys help secure our services
- We prefer open source fonts on our maps. We really like Libre Franklin.
- And, it’s worth reminding, there are thousands of pieces of open source technology go into each and every interaction you have with a computer.
For our distribution: Our maps are meant to be printed, framed, admired, studied, shared, and especially loved. We license our maps to give you maximal freedom to do that and respect the hell out of your right of first sale. If you buy a print from us, it’s yours. End of story.
If you buy a digital download from us, we’ll let you download the file twice for a period of one year. We trust and respect the hell out of our customers, and want you to be able to use the map for whatever it is you have in mind.
- This PDF has no “digital rights management,” meaning the file is yours to do what you want with it.
- These files carry an open source license.
- You’re free to edit, study, remix, destroy, and redistribute as much as you like.
- One thing you must do is maintain the licensing under the same terms. That is: You can’t go around using our maps in such a way that takes these liberties away from others.
Respect and trust is a two way street. Our goal is to reach as many people as we can with our maps. The reality is we price these maps so we can make a modest amount of income to subsidize our labor, contribute to these open source projects, and, most importantly: To make more maps.
If you like our maps so much that you want to run off a bunch of prints and sell them somewhere else, please get in touch with us. We’d love to work with you. We work with local printers and framers here in Milwaukee who we trust to make our products look beautiful. We care about quality as much as your freedom.
Leave a Reply