Open Source at Felt

Felt is built on open source geospatial tools. We contribute code to some and support others directly with funding and staffing.

We are a flagship sponsor of QGIS, helping build an ecosystem of mapping software

Felt has been the first flagship sponsor of QGIS for 2023, 2024, and 2025. Sophisticated users who collaborate and share their mapping work via Felt use us together with open source tools like QGIS for data preparation and analysis. Together, we’re contributing to a winning ecosystem of easy-to-use map-making tools for teams and organizations.

We build and open source the world’s best tiling engine, Tippecanoe

For the past decade Tippecanoe has been the best way to make scale-independent views of your data. At any level from the entire world to a single building, you can see the density and texture of the data rather than a simplification from dropping supposedly unimportant features or clustering or aggregating them. Creator Erica Fischer is a member of our engineering team. She makes it easy to see and share large-scale file uploads in Felt with new public releases of Tippecanoe.

Protomaps is creating new basemap systems with our support

Protomaps is a serverless system for planet-scale maps. Felt has financially supported development on new Protomaps features like PMTiles, a single-file archive format for tiled data enabling low-cost, zero-maintenance map applications. We rely on PMTiles for the Felt Upload Anything data import feature and are proud to support this work.

Code Contributions

Felt team members support vital open source geospatial tools with contributed code.

• MapLibre: Improve line labels using text-offset
• GDAL: Add /vsirar/ virtual file system for RAR compression format
• MapLibre: hold on to data used for FT_New_Memory_Face until after FT_Done_Face is called