9 ms·

A community-led fork of Organic Maps

332 points by maelito 1y ago

ano-ther 1y ago
What’s the backstory? > There was no real progress in negotiations with Organic Maps shareholders. > It appears that Viktor is only open to a guarantee not to sell the project, however besides that he wants to retain full control of Organic Maps. > And Organic Maps future is uncertain still, as the disagreement between shareholders (Viktor and Roman) has not been resolved.
- matteason 1y ago
  Looks like this is the backstory: https://www.comaps.app/news/2025-04-16/1/ https://www.comaps.app/news/2025-04-16/1/
- netbioserror 1y ago
  I'm more partial to a BDFL than a committee, so I'm not sure why I'd prefer this fork. Community management is not a de facto improvement.
  - protimewaster 1y ago
    It sounds like the problem is that they don't trust the BDFL to be B, since they're asking for more financial transparency and a bunch of other stuff.
  - johannes1234321 1y ago
    BDFL is a good concept. As long as money stays out of it. If the DFL collects money in a for profit Organisation and isn't transparent about usage, this is unsatisfactory to other contributors. I am not sure there is a huge market for selling the company, though, given the track record of the owners for taking the money and then forking away and trying to pull the users over.
  - lolinder 1y ago
    I'd have agreed with you a year ago, but the WordPress debacle shows that the BDFL concept really hangs on the "benevolent" part of the job description. If your BDFL goes rancid your only option is to fork, and hostile forks are very difficult to pull off because it almost invariably forks the community. The BDFL archetype is basically Plato's philosopher king. It's a nice and appealing idea in theory, and works well if you get a good one (Matz for Ruby, by all accounts). But it's risky, and it's hard to be sure yours is actually benevolent and will stay benevolent.
    - kortilla 1y ago
      The philosopher king analogy doesn’t hold water because forking is an option.
      - lolinder 1y ago
        Where is the WordPress fork? There is none because forking the code doesn't automatically bring the community along with you, and so no one wants to risk the instability that would inevitably come from forking. When a project needs a fork it usually much more closely resembles a civil war than it does a succession, and the whole system becomes weaker because of it. Why would we start with a model that we know will permanently weaken our community when we inevitably need to trigger a succession?
        lioeters 1y ago
        https://www.classicpress.net/ https://www.classicpress.net/ https://whitelabelpress.org/ https://whitelabelpress.org/
        hungryhobbit 1y ago
        There's no fork because there's no need for a fork. If the WordPress idiot was like "I'm going to make WordPress worse, and I don't care what anyone thinks", there would be a fork. But that's not what's happening. What's happening is that one WordPress host (the official one) is miffed that other hosts aren't paying a tax for the use of (100% open source) software. That makes the guy in charge an idiot who doesn't understand OSS, and his idiocy is helping to destroy his entire company ... but he's just being a bully: he's not hurting anyone's use of the software. Ergo, no fork.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    I could have been a BDFL for a project that I authored, but chose against that. I often say that the best thing that I ever did for the project, was walk away from it. The team that took it over, has made it extremely successful.
fsflover 1y ago
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43705631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43705631
conception 1y ago
Site still prompts to install organic maps app on mobile.
- HelloUsername 1y ago
  Indeed no working download buttons on https://www.comaps.app/download/ https://www.comaps.app/download/
  - Ndymium 1y ago
    It's mentioned in their code forge[0] that they're working on getting the first release out. So there's not yet anything to download. [0] https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps
- will-bradley 1y ago
  The "updates" link is for news and the "download" page has buttons that are inactive, are you seeing anything "Organic" remaining on the site? We've been trying to clean things up but may have missed something.
throwaway984393 1y ago
[flagged]
- bondarchuk 1y ago
  So now they're forking it, what's the big deal?
  - aloisdg 1y ago
    yes forking is the way to go.
  - carlosjobim 1y ago
    They're still going to work for free, and they're still going to be angry about it.
    - bondarchuk 1y ago
      Some people are always going to find something to be angry about (look at this very thread) but I don't see why the contributors would be angry as long as they can keep their work in community-led forks.
    - will-bradley 1y ago
      Nope, I'm only angry if I go telling all my friends that some app is the future of freedom and privacy, and printing flyers and driving them around town, and then that app turns and sells out their values to crypto scammers. I need reasonable assurance that my family can keep using an app I'm working on indefinitely without waking up one day to an auto-update that asks them to buy Bitcoin or something.
- flexagoon 1y ago
  The issue is that Organic Maps never positioned itself as a corporate project, and in fact was always marketed as a community alternative to all of the corporate solutions
- Y_Y 1y ago
sam_lowry_ 1y ago
Why do people contribute to Organic Maps and not to OSM? I always assumed that Organic Maps was a sophisticated way to distribute OSM data, nothing more.
- Freak_NL 1y ago
  Do you mean 'contribute' or 'donate'? Contributing fixes, bug reports, and code to FOSS projects using OpenStreetMap data makes sense to me, if they do something you appreciate.
- SamWhited 1y ago
  Organic Maps is a way to distribute OSM data, but it also has a lot more than just the OSM maps it uses (code to curate and collect those maps into downloadable packs, code to display them, code to do routing, design assets and resources for the app, documentation, etc.) You're correct that the maps are OSM though, you can always contribute to OSM and that will also help Organic Maps (or whatever new community based map project comes out!)
- maelito 1y ago
  OSM-the-database needs a general public app where contribution is possible to finally be popular. Organic was seen by many as this app, despite its specific choices like being offline. Contributing to this app is hence very important for OSM to exist given Google & Apple Maps.
  - RetroTechie 1y ago
    Option to contribute & offline-first is not mutually exclusive: Use map data offline, user makes a correction/addition, upload that when app has internet access.
    - xigoi 1y ago
      In fact, Organic already works like that.
  - ihatehn 1y ago
RetroTechie 1y ago
Sad how much good stuff gets destroyed by non-benevolent dictators and/or greed. Let's hope a community-led fork does so well that OM becomes a footnote in history. Or it causes OM owners to make a U-turn (but who cares @ this point. Just go ahead with community-led effort). Would need a new name though. How about a public-is-invited contest?
- Freak_NL 1y ago
  > Would need a new name though. How about a public-is-invited contest? Like the one linked to in the article? https://codeberg.org/comaps/Governance/issues/34 https://codeberg.org/comaps/Governance/issues/34
shark1 1y ago
OrganicMaps is such a great app. I did not know it was owned by this type of organisation. I hope they sort it out.
ForHackernews 1y ago
Wait, what, again? I thought Organic Maps was the "good"/BDFL-led/actually open fork of Maps.me that was bought and turned into malware?
- matkoniecz 1y ago
  Yes, it is fork of a fork.
techlatest_net 1y ago
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deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
saubeidl 1y ago
Again? Wasn't the whole thing about Organic Maps to be a community-led fork of maps.me? So now we're at a fork of a fork?
- przmk 1y ago
  I mean... Yeah, why not? That's one of the reasons FOSS is nice: people who are willing to maintain/contribute don't have to put up with a project going rogue.
- boramalper 1y ago
  > So now we're at a fork of a fork? This history is full of such "forks of forks" (whatever you're trying to imply with that): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix#/media/File:Unix_history-simple.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix#/media/File:Un...
  - saubeidl 1y ago
    I'm not trying to imply anything with that other than that it seems the original fork seems to have failed in its stated goals of being the community-led, non-commercialized version.
    - will-bradley 1y ago
      Yeah it's unfortunate. Allegedly Roman wrote those goals but the other co-founders never really went along with them.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
    There is a Smile of Love And there is a Smile of Deceit And there is a Smile of Smiles In which these two Smiles meet And there is a Frown of Hate And there is a Frown of disdain And there is a Frown of Frowns Which you strive to forget in vain -- William Blake, The Smile of Smiles https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47468/the-smile https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47468/the-smile
- 1y ago
whorleater 1y ago
A fork of a fork I guess, Organic Maps was originally `maps.me`, and I suppose we're forking it again
- palata 1y ago
  Yep... but I don't see it as a problem. Maybe CoMaps become the new thing, maybe Organic Maps changes and stays... The very fact that a fork can be made is good for the users. It doesn't mean that users have to follow the latest fork, though.
gray_charger 1y ago
What's the difference between Organic Maps/this and OSMAnd?
- dagw 1y ago
  OSMAnd has more advanced features and settings and things you can configure, but at the expense of a nice user friendly out of the box experience. Organic Maps (and thus this project) aimed to produce a more user friendly and streamlined app focusing on usability over lots of features.
  - atkirtland 1y ago
    The thing that keeps on Organic Maps instead of OSMAnd is how slow it is.
kmarc 1y ago
Sad to see the current state of mobile OSM-based apps. Maps.me becoming OrganicMaps, now this. Lot of development effort, great work going into it, but somehow, after years, the apps don't feel more user-friendly. I was pushing hard to replace Google Maps, but eventually, I gave up. OsmAnd is great if you need that "swiss army knife of OSM apps" on your phone, but I rarely do. Same with Maps.me/Organic Maps, try to search for something, mistype only one letter (surprise, surprise, that happens a lot on mobile), and you have no chance to get results. Alternative path for your bike route? Forget about it. Rendering is awful, either ugly, or slow, or both. I am trying to switch to Mapy.com (Mapy.cz before), it's a surprisingly user friendly app, however, not sure how they are going to monetize soon. So far the best on phone, I hope they will push and really become a Maps-replacement. They recently switched from a Czech-focused concept to a proper world-wide map (mapy.com); both web and mobile is great so far. (I am not Czech, and have no relation to mapy, simply really like their app) If OsmAnd got a new rendering engine (no, not that "3D" sluggish thing it has for a couple years now), like streetcomplete has (or the Strava-built-in mapbox renderer), it would be possibly the best.
- saubeidl 1y ago
  What do you think is the biggest UX issue with maps.me/organic maps/comaps/whatever?
  - kjrfghslkdjfl 1y ago
    [dead]
  - kmarc 1y ago
    The biggest for me is definitely the lack of public transportation. This is something even gnome-maps support. Global search (eg. things that are not downloaded yet) only works for some bigger entities, that are part of the world map (although I understand that this would need some server-side support). Not having a satellite map is also a bummer. Point-to-point navigation at places where you already downloaded maps is alright (same with osmand), but for exploration, or public trasnport, I would need to use moovit, mapy, osmand (wikipedia overlay is awesome), or google maps.
lolinder 1y ago
I'm increasingly disaffected by the idea of BDFL-run projects. The concept is appealing—it's essentially Plato's philosopher king. The BDFL can unstick decision making and ensure the project moves forward without having to litigate every decision in committee, they maintain context and vision throughout the life of the project, and because they're not accountable to anyone they can make the right call for the project rather than having to make complicated political trade-offs. It's all the perks of a monarchy. Unfortunately, we've seen over and over again that the BDFL model also has all the problems of monarchy. If you get a good one it's the most effective form of government, but people are fickle things. Frequently we see things like this, where the BDFL turns out to have been malevolent after all or decided that they are the project and are entitled to the sole profit from it. WordPress comes to mind. A good BDFL is worth keeping, but I think we'll find that drawing inspiration for our community structures from real-world democracies/republics will be more stable and reliable in the long term and more generalizable across new projects. Democracies aren't perfect, but by design they smooth out the variance of the individual humans in the community, giving you much more predictable results over time than monarchies do.
- gus_massa 1y ago
  You can't fork a country, but you can fork a open source project. Remember to not sign an CLA that gives superpowers to the current BDFL. So it's more like herding cats instead of nuking everyone that decides to ignore the presidencial orders or not paying taxes.
  - lolinder 1y ago
    Forks introduce chaos and are sometimes impossible. If WordPress had a different government structure from the beginning Matt would not be in power anymore, but because it's a dictator for life he's still there and the community has decided to put up with him rather than risk the chaos of a fork. No one is happy about it, but collective action is hard when it's not baked into the system.
- 0xbadcafebee 1y ago
  Worth noting the distinction between a BDFL-project and a community project. A community project's aim is loosey-goosey. The mission, values, governance, ownership/control, etc can change. While there is input from the community, they are often led by one or two dominant personalities. The project can often be pressured into making changes that are actually worse, or don't reflect the views of a collective of contributors and users. (I don't personally know of any community projects that are required to do what a majority opinion from the community asks for. In this sense it is more like a typical "democratic" government where a few powerful leaders are really in charge, rather than "the masses") A BDFL project is, by definition, one person's project. There is no secret agenda, because there's no need for it to be secret. There's no pressure from anyone, the project just does what the leader wants. This means there usually isn't "controversy" because if you don't like it you can lump it. Organic Maps is, apparently, not a BDFL project. It is a project represented by a corporation with 3 shareholders: Roman (project founder), Viktor, and Alexander (who is not a shareholder but Viktor supposedly holds his share). The concern in this case is that since it's not a BDFL project, the contributors don't know wtf is going to happen when the shareholders disagree and the "majority" decides to sell the company or something. If it were a BDFL project, the owner could still decide to sell it, but in this case, the project founder actually is on the side of the community. Personally I'm not aware of true BDFL projects working against the aims of its own community, and BDFLs don't really change what they do. The exception is when money is involved. If somebody's just getting paid to write open source, the project is safe; if somebody's selling the project as a Product, beware. "Money is a motive with a universal adaptor on it."
throw738384 1y ago
I would add a few points: * Organic Maps devs are from Belarus, company is registered in Estonia. This is very difficult setup already, and I can imagine authors just want simplest setup possible. Perhaps they do not want to waste energy on nonprofit that is very very difficult and expensive to do internationally! * If they sell the company so what? Create another fork and move on. It is opensource, but that does not mean authors can not get some money! * Biggest expense for Organic Maps is hosting and mirroring map data. Is this fork going to use (and pay) their own servers? * Is there list of developers and contributors behind this fork? I only found "us" and "we" and "community"!
- wertik12 1y ago
  The thing is that there is an ongoing conflict between owners of Organic Maps OU itself. Due to ownership structure this leads to block of development etc for a long time already, so some existing contributors (that are not a part of OM OU business entity) started a fork.
- palata 1y ago
  > If they sell the company so what? Create another fork and move on. It is opensource, but that does not mean authors can not get some money! Sure, but I think this is what's happening now. Not because they are selling the company, but apparently one issue is that nobody in the community knows where the donations are going. They (CoMaps) complain about transparency regarding finances. I believe this would be a good reason to fork.
  - throw738384 1y ago
    Donations are going to Organic Maps company. They have 10+ years of history. Most likely to pay for map server traffic. Non-profit does not guarantee transparency, look at Mozilla as an example. This fork is just a bunch of anonymous dudes on internet, who setup PayPal and replaced donate button. Until they do map data hosting, there is not much credibility! Edit: there are 3th party mirrors for manual download, so I guess they can use those.
    - 1y ago
nicpottier 1y ago
I've contributed a few trivial fixes to OrganicMaps and I found them to be pretty responsive and reasonable in their opinions. That doesn't mean I agreed with all the decisions or priorities they make but that's to be expected. Their leadership seemed sane enough to me. It certainly felt like close enough to a BDFL situation to me. In the research I did, OrganicMaps was the only viable open alternative to something like Gaia and it wasn't particularly close. It does a pretty good job of that, though their map styles leave some things to be desired and meter only topo lines is a bummer. My limited experience playing around with the codebase made me appreciate that this isn't a small or simple project. It is a huge mixed codebase of C/Java/etc to share rendering across platforms and even just the map file generation is no small thing. Color me skeptical that a fork will get off the ground, this seems more likely to me that both projects will struggle for a good while longer. Announcing a fork is easy, delivering something with enough value beyond rhetoric that will draw users over is another.
- palata 1y ago
  > Color me skeptical that a fork will get off the ground Could be, time will tell us. But it works as expected: people can fork if they want to, users can choose which app they use. Users can even use both OrganicMaps and CoMaps if that's better for them! I currently use OrganicMaps and OSMAnd in parallel, depending on what I do. Works great!
- ihatehn 1y ago
  The good news is that the fork team is a majority of the top contributors outside of the owners, and the owners have been burnt out and embroiled in conflict for months, so I expect the experience to be roughly the same or better going forward. Drawing users is a gradual process no matter what, but isn't really the #1 metric of a FOSS project... active contribution by diverse contributors is, next to usability and popularity.
neilv 1y ago
Something I often wonder about forks, just as good practice... Is anyone from the Organic Maps and OSM contributor communities familiar with the people forking this, and can vouch for their intentions and the necessity of forking? How do we get confidence in that?
- ihatehn 1y ago
  Most of the activity is public, so look at the usernames of the fork leaders vs their activity on the upstream project... It's most of the recent top contributors who've been around for a long time and made their perspectives pretty clear.
  - neilv 1y ago
    Good point. I wonder whether it would be good for forks to come with a page that makes a case for the legitimacy of the fork and who will be controlling it and/or setting the founding rules for the governance. With links back to supporting raw evidence in repos and forums, so people can verify. The thing being forked could also respond to these clear assertion, which could be a check against confusing forks that are bad-faith, ill-conceived, not necessarily aligned, etc. (Of course, when I hear of a fork, I instantly assume that there was probably a good reason, and there usually is, but always assuming that is a mistake, which exposes us another way to bad actor risk.)
    - will-bradley 1y ago
      Most of the top 16 signers of the open letter are well-known names in Organic Maps, and the Updates to the letter try to fairly characterize the (lack of) response from OM. It's hard to link directly to raw evidence for the general public to review, since the most concerning topics (what will owners do in the future, what have they done with donation money) were in chat rooms that don't have public links and are exactly what the letter is asking for OM "owners" to provide. https://openletter.earth/open-letter-to-organic-maps-shareholders-a0bf770c https://openletter.earth/open-letter-to-organic-maps-shareho... Here's the CoMaps governance repo for deciding on decisionmaking: https://codeberg.org/comaps/Governance/ https://codeberg.org/comaps/Governance/ and the leadership here https://codeberg.org/org/comaps/members https://codeberg.org/org/comaps/members vs top contributors to OM since the Maps.me fork: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/graphs/contributors?from=12%2F2%2F2020&to=5%2F10%2F2025 https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/graphs/contributo... We've got some FAQs up about legitimacy and plans but the website was literally coming together over the weekend, so there's more work to be done for sure. https://www.comaps.app/support/ https://www.comaps.app/support/ -- one thing we're also trying to do is focus on the future rather than rehash issues that haven't seen resolution in chat channels in over a month and don't seem to be getting resolved any time soon. The community and users deserve an actively-developed app, and the CoMaps founders don't want to continue contributing to a for-profit app, so in absence of a timely satisfactory resolution all our energy is going into the fork!
evolve2k 1y ago
A few people are talking about multiple issues in the open mapping space. Today (bear with me), I was looking at a tool called SwiftWave it lets you run your own Platform as a Service. The only reason I mention it is that I found interesting how they’ve really broken the problem domain into a series of smaller open source projects. https://swiftwave.org/docs/contribution_guideline https://swiftwave.org/docs/contribution_guideline I’d love some folk riffing on how this may help, surely nice interfaces for cycling vs driving vs public transport don’t need to be reinvented across projects. How can diff apps work as an ecosystem to allow the brining together of more sophisticated apps that mirror the feature set of the large funded maps apps?
0xbadcafebee 1y ago
The concern seems to be they want a bunch of guarantees about what will be done with the project - not because there is a change happening from Organic, but because they're afraid of a change happening in the future. If such a change happens in the future, they can fork then. I mean, hell, this already happened; they had Maps.ME, it was sold, Roman forked it to Organic. If it gets sold again they can fork again. This seems like it'll hurt the community more than if they'd waited until it was necessary.
- palata 1y ago
  > not because there is a change happening from Organic They mention financial transparency. I don't know the details, but "we want to know what our donations are used for" is a reasonable request to have, I would say.
- Stephen304 1y ago
  > If such a change happens in the future, they can fork then... Did such a change not already happen with the addition of Kayak affiliate links without any community consultation? It seems to me that there has already been enough to justify a fork. Not to mention, there was a promise of electing and changing boardmembers which has never happened, and hiding the use of OrganicMaps project donations for personal vacations as alleged by the initial open letter.
  - rafram 1y ago
    > hiding the use of OrganicMaps project donations for personal vacations as alleged by the initial open letter Were those donations intended to support the core developers generally? Or were they specifically intended to pay for servers, equipment, etc.? If it’s the former, a vacation seems like a totally legitimate use. If the latter, not so much.
    - Stephen304 1y ago
      > If it’s the former, a vacation seems like a totally legitimate use Imo hiding that the funds were used even in a legitimate case makes it improper. If it was intended to be paid as a salary then they should have disclosed that $x were paid out as a salary. As I understand it, the only reason we know that the funds left the project was because one of the founders revealed the use of funds by the other founders, not through a planned, transparent, or regular process. In other words, the revelation that funds were being used seemed to be an anomaly as opposed to a regular practice. The original open letter states essentially as much: "It's fine for developers to be reimbursed for their hard work, but it should be done in a fair, transparent and accountable way."
vng_me 1y ago
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- ratatoskrt 1y ago
  Ugh... I guess legally it's okay (as the whole code including the website seems to be Apache-licensed) but the optics are not great...
- serial_dev 1y ago
  Why do you say stealing, it’s open source.
  - vng_me 1y ago
    Well, the code still belongs to the author, who was paid by the Organic company. It is not even merged and the DCO is not signed. Even legally, there are questions here, not to mention the "high community principles".
    - ratatoskrt 1y ago
      The changes have been committed and pushed to a branch of the main (Apache-licensed) repo, with the clear intention of eventually being merged into the main branch. So it’s hard to argue the code isn’t published under the same licence as everything else. Still, I think they should have created their own website.
    - pastk 1y ago
      I'll just quote Oleg, who was an Organic Maps contributor working on the new website (amongst other things) and is in the CoMaps team now: "The original design was created by me. I also personally hired and paid for a designer to also work on the design. Later I hired a developer and paid him myself to develop the website. Recently minor updates were made, for example removing the stock photos from the Community page, which was paid by OM. This was from the beginning through today open source under the Apache license."
metalman 1y ago
funny, I had to abandon open maps,yesterday, for a fork, as they no longer have an english language version, that used to be hidden under "tranport",which is now reduced to purple and green andessentialy no map info.
- will-bradley 1y ago
  [dead]
smcleod 1y ago
I'm not sure I understand why an open source maps app needs shareholders in the first place?
- will-bradley 1y ago
  Originally Alexander said that it was just too hard to register a nonprofit. I think the real answer is that he always intended to use it as an investment and sell it off (open source, but basically selling the userbase, just like Maps.ME.) Hopefully we can prove all that wrong and get a not-for-profit organization assembled and sustainable!
curtisszmania 1y ago
[dead]
wltr 1y ago
I would be sceptical to this initiative too, as they never mentioned in their timeline on the co maps website that the reason the original Maps with me project was forked because the original one was sold. And not just sold, but sold to Russians, the infamous Mail ru group. Which is basically the KGB spying project led by a greasy oligarch.
kristel100 1y ago
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gitroom 1y ago
Honestly just feels like every new fork is more drama packed onto old drama and nothing ever really gets fixed. You ever wonder if all this splitting and fighting actually makes stuff better or just burns everyone out?

332 points by maelito 1y ago

What’s the backstory? > There was no real progress in negotiations with Organic Maps shareholders. > It appears that Viktor is only open to a guarantee not to sell the project, however besides that he wants to retain full control of Organic Maps. > And Organic Maps future is uncertain still, as the disagreement between shareholders (Viktor and Roman) has not been resolved.

matteason 1y ago
Looks like this is the backstory: https://www.comaps.app/news/2025-04-16/1/ https://www.comaps.app/news/2025-04-16/1/
netbioserror 1y ago
I'm more partial to a BDFL than a committee, so I'm not sure why I'd prefer this fork. Community management is not a de facto improvement.
- protimewaster 1y ago
  It sounds like the problem is that they don't trust the BDFL to be B, since they're asking for more financial transparency and a bunch of other stuff.
- johannes1234321 1y ago
  BDFL is a good concept. As long as money stays out of it. If the DFL collects money in a for profit Organisation and isn't transparent about usage, this is unsatisfactory to other contributors. I am not sure there is a huge market for selling the company, though, given the track record of the owners for taking the money and then forking away and trying to pull the users over.
- lolinder 1y ago
  I'd have agreed with you a year ago, but the WordPress debacle shows that the BDFL concept really hangs on the "benevolent" part of the job description. If your BDFL goes rancid your only option is to fork, and hostile forks are very difficult to pull off because it almost invariably forks the community. The BDFL archetype is basically Plato's philosopher king. It's a nice and appealing idea in theory, and works well if you get a good one (Matz for Ruby, by all accounts). But it's risky, and it's hard to be sure yours is actually benevolent and will stay benevolent.
  - kortilla 1y ago
    The philosopher king analogy doesn’t hold water because forking is an option.
    - lolinder 1y ago
      Where is the WordPress fork? There is none because forking the code doesn't automatically bring the community along with you, and so no one wants to risk the instability that would inevitably come from forking. When a project needs a fork it usually much more closely resembles a civil war than it does a succession, and the whole system becomes weaker because of it. Why would we start with a model that we know will permanently weaken our community when we inevitably need to trigger a succession?
      - lioeters 1y ago
        https://www.classicpress.net/ https://www.classicpress.net/ https://whitelabelpress.org/ https://whitelabelpress.org/
      - hungryhobbit 1y ago
        There's no fork because there's no need for a fork. If the WordPress idiot was like "I'm going to make WordPress worse, and I don't care what anyone thinks", there would be a fork. But that's not what's happening. What's happening is that one WordPress host (the official one) is miffed that other hosts aren't paying a tax for the use of (100% open source) software. That makes the guy in charge an idiot who doesn't understand OSS, and his idiocy is helping to destroy his entire company ... but he's just being a bully: he's not hurting anyone's use of the software. Ergo, no fork.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  I could have been a BDFL for a project that I authored, but chose against that. I often say that the best thing that I ever did for the project, was walk away from it. The team that took it over, has made it extremely successful.

fsflover 1y ago

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43705631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43705631

conception 1y ago

Site still prompts to install organic maps app on mobile.

HelloUsername 1y ago
Indeed no working download buttons on https://www.comaps.app/download/ https://www.comaps.app/download/
- Ndymium 1y ago
  It's mentioned in their code forge[0] that they're working on getting the first release out. So there's not yet anything to download. [0] https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps
will-bradley 1y ago
The "updates" link is for news and the "download" page has buttons that are inactive, are you seeing anything "Organic" remaining on the site? We've been trying to clean things up but may have missed something.

throwaway984393 1y ago

[flagged]

bondarchuk 1y ago
So now they're forking it, what's the big deal?
- aloisdg 1y ago
  yes forking is the way to go.
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  They're still going to work for free, and they're still going to be angry about it.
  - bondarchuk 1y ago
    Some people are always going to find something to be angry about (look at this very thread) but I don't see why the contributors would be angry as long as they can keep their work in community-led forks.
  - will-bradley 1y ago
    Nope, I'm only angry if I go telling all my friends that some app is the future of freedom and privacy, and printing flyers and driving them around town, and then that app turns and sells out their values to crypto scammers. I need reasonable assurance that my family can keep using an app I'm working on indefinitely without waking up one day to an auto-update that asks them to buy Bitcoin or something.
flexagoon 1y ago
The issue is that Organic Maps never positioned itself as a corporate project, and in fact was always marketed as a community alternative to all of the corporate solutions
Y_Y 1y ago

sam_lowry_ 1y ago

Why do people contribute to Organic Maps and not to OSM? I always assumed that Organic Maps was a sophisticated way to distribute OSM data, nothing more.

Freak_NL 1y ago
Do you mean 'contribute' or 'donate'? Contributing fixes, bug reports, and code to FOSS projects using OpenStreetMap data makes sense to me, if they do something you appreciate.
SamWhited 1y ago
Organic Maps is a way to distribute OSM data, but it also has a lot more than just the OSM maps it uses (code to curate and collect those maps into downloadable packs, code to display them, code to do routing, design assets and resources for the app, documentation, etc.) You're correct that the maps are OSM though, you can always contribute to OSM and that will also help Organic Maps (or whatever new community based map project comes out!)
maelito 1y ago
OSM-the-database needs a general public app where contribution is possible to finally be popular. Organic was seen by many as this app, despite its specific choices like being offline. Contributing to this app is hence very important for OSM to exist given Google & Apple Maps.
- RetroTechie 1y ago
  Option to contribute & offline-first is not mutually exclusive: Use map data offline, user makes a correction/addition, upload that when app has internet access.
  - xigoi 1y ago
    In fact, Organic already works like that.
- ihatehn 1y ago

RetroTechie 1y ago

Sad how much good stuff gets destroyed by non-benevolent dictators and/or greed. Let's hope a community-led fork does so well that OM becomes a footnote in history. Or it causes OM owners to make a U-turn (but who cares @ this point. Just go ahead with community-led effort). Would need a new name though. How about a public-is-invited contest?

Freak_NL 1y ago
> Would need a new name though. How about a public-is-invited contest? Like the one linked to in the article? https://codeberg.org/comaps/Governance/issues/34 https://codeberg.org/comaps/Governance/issues/34

shark1 1y ago

OrganicMaps is such a great app. I did not know it was owned by this type of organisation. I hope they sort it out.

ForHackernews 1y ago

Wait, what, again? I thought Organic Maps was the "good"/BDFL-led/actually open fork of Maps.me that was bought and turned into malware?

matkoniecz 1y ago
Yes, it is fork of a fork.

techlatest_net 1y ago

[dead]

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

saubeidl 1y ago

Again? Wasn't the whole thing about Organic Maps to be a community-led fork of maps.me? So now we're at a fork of a fork?

przmk 1y ago
I mean... Yeah, why not? That's one of the reasons FOSS is nice: people who are willing to maintain/contribute don't have to put up with a project going rogue.
boramalper 1y ago
> So now we're at a fork of a fork? This history is full of such "forks of forks" (whatever you're trying to imply with that): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix#/media/File:Unix_history-simple.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix#/media/File:Un...
- saubeidl 1y ago
  I'm not trying to imply anything with that other than that it seems the original fork seems to have failed in its stated goals of being the community-led, non-commercialized version.
  - will-bradley 1y ago
    Yeah it's unfortunate. Allegedly Roman wrote those goals but the other co-founders never really went along with them.
- PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
  There is a Smile of Love And there is a Smile of Deceit And there is a Smile of Smiles In which these two Smiles meet And there is a Frown of Hate And there is a Frown of disdain And there is a Frown of Frowns Which you strive to forget in vain -- William Blake, The Smile of Smiles https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47468/the-smile https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47468/the-smile
1y ago

whorleater 1y ago

A fork of a fork I guess, Organic Maps was originally `maps.me`, and I suppose we're forking it again

palata 1y ago
Yep... but I don't see it as a problem. Maybe CoMaps become the new thing, maybe Organic Maps changes and stays... The very fact that a fork can be made is good for the users. It doesn't mean that users have to follow the latest fork, though.

gray_charger 1y ago

What's the difference between Organic Maps/this and OSMAnd?

dagw 1y ago
OSMAnd has more advanced features and settings and things you can configure, but at the expense of a nice user friendly out of the box experience. Organic Maps (and thus this project) aimed to produce a more user friendly and streamlined app focusing on usability over lots of features.
- atkirtland 1y ago
  The thing that keeps on Organic Maps instead of OSMAnd is how slow it is.

kmarc 1y ago

Sad to see the current state of mobile OSM-based apps. Maps.me becoming OrganicMaps, now this. Lot of development effort, great work going into it, but somehow, after years, the apps don't feel more user-friendly. I was pushing hard to replace Google Maps, but eventually, I gave up. OsmAnd is great if you need that "swiss army knife of OSM apps" on your phone, but I rarely do. Same with Maps.me/Organic Maps, try to search for something, mistype only one letter (surprise, surprise, that happens a lot on mobile), and you have no chance to get results. Alternative path for your bike route? Forget about it. Rendering is awful, either ugly, or slow, or both. I am trying to switch to Mapy.com (Mapy.cz before), it's a surprisingly user friendly app, however, not sure how they are going to monetize soon. So far the best on phone, I hope they will push and really become a Maps-replacement. They recently switched from a Czech-focused concept to a proper world-wide map (mapy.com); both web and mobile is great so far. (I am not Czech, and have no relation to mapy, simply really like their app) If OsmAnd got a new rendering engine (no, not that "3D" sluggish thing it has for a couple years now), like streetcomplete has (or the Strava-built-in mapbox renderer), it would be possibly the best.

saubeidl 1y ago
What do you think is the biggest UX issue with maps.me/organic maps/comaps/whatever?
- kjrfghslkdjfl 1y ago
  [dead]
- kmarc 1y ago
  The biggest for me is definitely the lack of public transportation. This is something even gnome-maps support. Global search (eg. things that are not downloaded yet) only works for some bigger entities, that are part of the world map (although I understand that this would need some server-side support). Not having a satellite map is also a bummer. Point-to-point navigation at places where you already downloaded maps is alright (same with osmand), but for exploration, or public trasnport, I would need to use moovit, mapy, osmand (wikipedia overlay is awesome), or google maps.

lolinder 1y ago

I'm increasingly disaffected by the idea of BDFL-run projects. The concept is appealing—it's essentially Plato's philosopher king. The BDFL can unstick decision making and ensure the project moves forward without having to litigate every decision in committee, they maintain context and vision throughout the life of the project, and because they're not accountable to anyone they can make the right call for the project rather than having to make complicated political trade-offs. It's all the perks of a monarchy. Unfortunately, we've seen over and over again that the BDFL model also has all the problems of monarchy. If you get a good one it's the most effective form of government, but people are fickle things. Frequently we see things like this, where the BDFL turns out to have been malevolent after all or decided that they are the project and are entitled to the sole profit from it. WordPress comes to mind. A good BDFL is worth keeping, but I think we'll find that drawing inspiration for our community structures from real-world democracies/republics will be more stable and reliable in the long term and more generalizable across new projects. Democracies aren't perfect, but by design they smooth out the variance of the individual humans in the community, giving you much more predictable results over time than monarchies do.

gus_massa 1y ago
You can't fork a country, but you can fork a open source project. Remember to not sign an CLA that gives superpowers to the current BDFL. So it's more like herding cats instead of nuking everyone that decides to ignore the presidencial orders or not paying taxes.
- lolinder 1y ago
  Forks introduce chaos and are sometimes impossible. If WordPress had a different government structure from the beginning Matt would not be in power anymore, but because it's a dictator for life he's still there and the community has decided to put up with him rather than risk the chaos of a fork. No one is happy about it, but collective action is hard when it's not baked into the system.
0xbadcafebee 1y ago
Worth noting the distinction between a BDFL-project and a community project. A community project's aim is loosey-goosey. The mission, values, governance, ownership/control, etc can change. While there is input from the community, they are often led by one or two dominant personalities. The project can often be pressured into making changes that are actually worse, or don't reflect the views of a collective of contributors and users. (I don't personally know of any community projects that are required to do what a majority opinion from the community asks for. In this sense it is more like a typical "democratic" government where a few powerful leaders are really in charge, rather than "the masses") A BDFL project is, by definition, one person's project. There is no secret agenda, because there's no need for it to be secret. There's no pressure from anyone, the project just does what the leader wants. This means there usually isn't "controversy" because if you don't like it you can lump it. Organic Maps is, apparently, not a BDFL project. It is a project represented by a corporation with 3 shareholders: Roman (project founder), Viktor, and Alexander (who is not a shareholder but Viktor supposedly holds his share). The concern in this case is that since it's not a BDFL project, the contributors don't know wtf is going to happen when the shareholders disagree and the "majority" decides to sell the company or something. If it were a BDFL project, the owner could still decide to sell it, but in this case, the project founder actually is on the side of the community. Personally I'm not aware of true BDFL projects working against the aims of its own community, and BDFLs don't really change what they do. The exception is when money is involved. If somebody's just getting paid to write open source, the project is safe; if somebody's selling the project as a Product, beware. "Money is a motive with a universal adaptor on it."

throw738384 1y ago

I would add a few points: * Organic Maps devs are from Belarus, company is registered in Estonia. This is very difficult setup already, and I can imagine authors just want simplest setup possible. Perhaps they do not want to waste energy on nonprofit that is very very difficult and expensive to do internationally! * If they sell the company so what? Create another fork and move on. It is opensource, but that does not mean authors can not get some money! * Biggest expense for Organic Maps is hosting and mirroring map data. Is this fork going to use (and pay) their own servers? * Is there list of developers and contributors behind this fork? I only found "us" and "we" and "community"!

wertik12 1y ago
The thing is that there is an ongoing conflict between owners of Organic Maps OU itself. Due to ownership structure this leads to block of development etc for a long time already, so some existing contributors (that are not a part of OM OU business entity) started a fork.
palata 1y ago
> If they sell the company so what? Create another fork and move on. It is opensource, but that does not mean authors can not get some money! Sure, but I think this is what's happening now. Not because they are selling the company, but apparently one issue is that nobody in the community knows where the donations are going. They (CoMaps) complain about transparency regarding finances. I believe this would be a good reason to fork.
- throw738384 1y ago
  Donations are going to Organic Maps company. They have 10+ years of history. Most likely to pay for map server traffic. Non-profit does not guarantee transparency, look at Mozilla as an example. This fork is just a bunch of anonymous dudes on internet, who setup PayPal and replaced donate button. Until they do map data hosting, there is not much credibility! Edit: there are 3th party mirrors for manual download, so I guess they can use those.
  - 1y ago

nicpottier 1y ago

I've contributed a few trivial fixes to OrganicMaps and I found them to be pretty responsive and reasonable in their opinions. That doesn't mean I agreed with all the decisions or priorities they make but that's to be expected. Their leadership seemed sane enough to me. It certainly felt like close enough to a BDFL situation to me. In the research I did, OrganicMaps was the only viable open alternative to something like Gaia and it wasn't particularly close. It does a pretty good job of that, though their map styles leave some things to be desired and meter only topo lines is a bummer. My limited experience playing around with the codebase made me appreciate that this isn't a small or simple project. It is a huge mixed codebase of C/Java/etc to share rendering across platforms and even just the map file generation is no small thing. Color me skeptical that a fork will get off the ground, this seems more likely to me that both projects will struggle for a good while longer. Announcing a fork is easy, delivering something with enough value beyond rhetoric that will draw users over is another.

palata 1y ago
> Color me skeptical that a fork will get off the ground Could be, time will tell us. But it works as expected: people can fork if they want to, users can choose which app they use. Users can even use both OrganicMaps and CoMaps if that's better for them! I currently use OrganicMaps and OSMAnd in parallel, depending on what I do. Works great!
ihatehn 1y ago
The good news is that the fork team is a majority of the top contributors outside of the owners, and the owners have been burnt out and embroiled in conflict for months, so I expect the experience to be roughly the same or better going forward. Drawing users is a gradual process no matter what, but isn't really the #1 metric of a FOSS project... active contribution by diverse contributors is, next to usability and popularity.

neilv 1y ago

Something I often wonder about forks, just as good practice... Is anyone from the Organic Maps and OSM contributor communities familiar with the people forking this, and can vouch for their intentions and the necessity of forking? How do we get confidence in that?

ihatehn 1y ago
Most of the activity is public, so look at the usernames of the fork leaders vs their activity on the upstream project... It's most of the recent top contributors who've been around for a long time and made their perspectives pretty clear.
- neilv 1y ago
  Good point. I wonder whether it would be good for forks to come with a page that makes a case for the legitimacy of the fork and who will be controlling it and/or setting the founding rules for the governance. With links back to supporting raw evidence in repos and forums, so people can verify. The thing being forked could also respond to these clear assertion, which could be a check against confusing forks that are bad-faith, ill-conceived, not necessarily aligned, etc. (Of course, when I hear of a fork, I instantly assume that there was probably a good reason, and there usually is, but always assuming that is a mistake, which exposes us another way to bad actor risk.)
  - will-bradley 1y ago
    Most of the top 16 signers of the open letter are well-known names in Organic Maps, and the Updates to the letter try to fairly characterize the (lack of) response from OM. It's hard to link directly to raw evidence for the general public to review, since the most concerning topics (what will owners do in the future, what have they done with donation money) were in chat rooms that don't have public links and are exactly what the letter is asking for OM "owners" to provide. https://openletter.earth/open-letter-to-organic-maps-shareholders-a0bf770c https://openletter.earth/open-letter-to-organic-maps-shareho... Here's the CoMaps governance repo for deciding on decisionmaking: https://codeberg.org/comaps/Governance/ https://codeberg.org/comaps/Governance/ and the leadership here https://codeberg.org/org/comaps/members https://codeberg.org/org/comaps/members vs top contributors to OM since the Maps.me fork: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/graphs/contributors?from=12%2F2%2F2020&to=5%2F10%2F2025 https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/graphs/contributo... We've got some FAQs up about legitimacy and plans but the website was literally coming together over the weekend, so there's more work to be done for sure. https://www.comaps.app/support/ https://www.comaps.app/support/ -- one thing we're also trying to do is focus on the future rather than rehash issues that haven't seen resolution in chat channels in over a month and don't seem to be getting resolved any time soon. The community and users deserve an actively-developed app, and the CoMaps founders don't want to continue contributing to a for-profit app, so in absence of a timely satisfactory resolution all our energy is going into the fork!

evolve2k 1y ago

A few people are talking about multiple issues in the open mapping space. Today (bear with me), I was looking at a tool called SwiftWave it lets you run your own Platform as a Service. The only reason I mention it is that I found interesting how they’ve really broken the problem domain into a series of smaller open source projects. https://swiftwave.org/docs/contribution_guideline https://swiftwave.org/docs/contribution_guideline I’d love some folk riffing on how this may help, surely nice interfaces for cycling vs driving vs public transport don’t need to be reinvented across projects. How can diff apps work as an ecosystem to allow the brining together of more sophisticated apps that mirror the feature set of the large funded maps apps?

0xbadcafebee 1y ago

The concern seems to be they want a bunch of guarantees about what will be done with the project - not because there is a change happening from Organic, but because they're afraid of a change happening in the future. If such a change happens in the future, they can fork then. I mean, hell, this already happened; they had Maps.ME, it was sold, Roman forked it to Organic. If it gets sold again they can fork again. This seems like it'll hurt the community more than if they'd waited until it was necessary.

palata 1y ago
> not because there is a change happening from Organic They mention financial transparency. I don't know the details, but "we want to know what our donations are used for" is a reasonable request to have, I would say.
Stephen304 1y ago
> If such a change happens in the future, they can fork then... Did such a change not already happen with the addition of Kayak affiliate links without any community consultation? It seems to me that there has already been enough to justify a fork. Not to mention, there was a promise of electing and changing boardmembers which has never happened, and hiding the use of OrganicMaps project donations for personal vacations as alleged by the initial open letter.
- rafram 1y ago
  > hiding the use of OrganicMaps project donations for personal vacations as alleged by the initial open letter Were those donations intended to support the core developers generally? Or were they specifically intended to pay for servers, equipment, etc.? If it’s the former, a vacation seems like a totally legitimate use. If the latter, not so much.
  - Stephen304 1y ago
    > If it’s the former, a vacation seems like a totally legitimate use Imo hiding that the funds were used even in a legitimate case makes it improper. If it was intended to be paid as a salary then they should have disclosed that $x were paid out as a salary. As I understand it, the only reason we know that the funds left the project was because one of the founders revealed the use of funds by the other founders, not through a planned, transparent, or regular process. In other words, the revelation that funds were being used seemed to be an anomaly as opposed to a regular practice. The original open letter states essentially as much: "It's fine for developers to be reimbursed for their hard work, but it should be done in a fair, transparent and accountable way."

vng_me 1y ago

[dead]

ratatoskrt 1y ago
Ugh... I guess legally it's okay (as the whole code including the website seems to be Apache-licensed) but the optics are not great...
serial_dev 1y ago
Why do you say stealing, it’s open source.
- vng_me 1y ago
  Well, the code still belongs to the author, who was paid by the Organic company. It is not even merged and the DCO is not signed. Even legally, there are questions here, not to mention the "high community principles".
  - ratatoskrt 1y ago
    The changes have been committed and pushed to a branch of the main (Apache-licensed) repo, with the clear intention of eventually being merged into the main branch. So it’s hard to argue the code isn’t published under the same licence as everything else. Still, I think they should have created their own website.
  - pastk 1y ago
    I'll just quote Oleg, who was an Organic Maps contributor working on the new website (amongst other things) and is in the CoMaps team now: "The original design was created by me. I also personally hired and paid for a designer to also work on the design. Later I hired a developer and paid him myself to develop the website. Recently minor updates were made, for example removing the stock photos from the Community page, which was paid by OM. This was from the beginning through today open source under the Apache license."

metalman 1y ago

funny, I had to abandon open maps,yesterday, for a fork, as they no longer have an english language version, that used to be hidden under "tranport",which is now reduced to purple and green andessentialy no map info.

will-bradley 1y ago
[dead]

smcleod 1y ago

I'm not sure I understand why an open source maps app needs shareholders in the first place?

will-bradley 1y ago
Originally Alexander said that it was just too hard to register a nonprofit. I think the real answer is that he always intended to use it as an investment and sell it off (open source, but basically selling the userbase, just like Maps.ME.) Hopefully we can prove all that wrong and get a not-for-profit organization assembled and sustainable!

curtisszmania 1y ago

[dead]

wltr 1y ago

I would be sceptical to this initiative too, as they never mentioned in their timeline on the co maps website that the reason the original Maps with me project was forked because the original one was sold. And not just sold, but sold to Russians, the infamous Mail ru group. Which is basically the KGB spying project led by a greasy oligarch.

kristel100 1y ago

[dead]

gitroom 1y ago

Honestly just feels like every new fork is more drama packed onto old drama and nothing ever really gets fixed. You ever wonder if all this splitting and fighting actually makes stuff better or just burns everyone out?