License enforced at registration
Not documented and forgotten.
Technology · Data · Whitepaper
From a public endpoint to a dark phone.
Two hundred registered sources become tiles on a device with no signal by way of a license gate, a normalizing proxy, a region builder and a version pin. This page documents each stage and what it refuses to do.
01 / Problem statement
What this has to solve.
Tile pipelines fail quietly, which is what makes them dangerous.
License drift. A source added during prototyping under a non-commercial license remains in production. Nobody notices until a customer uses the output commercially.
Rate-limit abuse. A public tile endpoint used at scale without caching gets the whole application blocked, usually at the worst moment.
Silent staleness. A cached region looks identical whether it is a day or three years old. The user has no way to tell, and the software has not told them.
02 / Mechanism
The design, component by component.
- Source registration
- Every source is a record: provider, attribution, license, update cadence, coverage envelope, data type and endpoint. A source without a license field cannot be registered.
- License gate
- The license determines whether a source is available for commercial use and whether its endpoint may be published. This is enforced at registration, not documented in a wiki.
- Type dispatch
- Vector, raster, WMS, GeoJSON and API sources take different paths through the proxy, because they cache and composite differently.
- Normalizing proxy
- Endpoint templates are normalized to a single {z}/{x}/{y} convention, upstream rate limits are respected, and responses are cached so a public endpoint is never hit at application scale.
- Region builder
- A region is an area, a zoom envelope and the set of enabled layers. The size is estimated per layer before download, so a fifty-gigabyte mistake is prevented rather than discovered.
- Version pin
- The tile epoch is recorded per layer at download. The region list shows the age of each layer, which is how staleness becomes visible.
- Render
- MapLibre composites style layers in a defined order, and every visible layer is credited on screen.
- Attribution surface
- Non-negotiable. If a layer is rendering, its attribution is in the view.
03 / Properties
What this guarantees.
Upstream limits respected
Cached proxy, never direct at scale.
Size estimated before download
Per layer, before you commit.
Per-layer epoch recorded
Staleness is a date.
Attribution always visible
So a screenshot carries its own provenance.
User and organization sources
Registered through the same pipeline as ours.
04 / Reference
| Stage | Input | Refuses |
|---|---|---|
| Registration | Provider, license, endpoint, cadence | A source with no license field |
| License gate | License terms | Commercial use where not permitted |
| Type dispatch | Data type | An unrecognised type |
| Proxy | Endpoint template | Requests beyond the upstream limit |
| Region builder | Area, zoom, layer set | A download beyond the tier allowance |
| Version pin | Tile epoch | Nothing — it only records |
| Render | Style layers | Rendering without attribution |
05 / Process
Traced, node by node.
Nothing renders without its license.
This is why the layer count on the comparison page is a number we will defend.