Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A community-led fork of Organic Maps

comaps.app

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 217 posts

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#111

Post by mcv »

karussell wrote: post #81
kmarc wrote: post #32

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 s…

OSMAnd and OrganicMaps both have the limitation (and big advantage) of functioning offline by default. The routing will be much more powerful (with alternatives on by default) and faster if you enable an online routing service. For OSMAnd this is possible with e.g. GraphHopper: https://www.graphhopper.com/blog/2024/02/27/osmand-with-grap... The same is true for address search. If you have an online address search lik…

Offline navigation is really nice. The fact that I can use maps and find routes regardless of where I am and what connection I have, is great.

It would be nice to have slightly smarter search, though. That definitely requires improvement. Even just the ordering of the results is terrible sometimes.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#112

Post by ihatehn »

nicpottier wrote: post #52

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 l…

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.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#113

Post by Stephen304 »

rafram wrote: post #106
Stephen304 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 vacati…

> 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.

> 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."

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#114

Post by ihatehn »

neilv wrote: post #60

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?

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.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#115

Post by et-al »

RetroTechie wrote: post #48
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #13

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.

You need both: the map data (OSM project), and software for viewing/using it. Ideally any app using OSM data would enable contributing to the underlaying map data. But that's probably not how it works. For what it's worth: I like Organic Maps for being more lightweight, quicker rendering & simpler configuration than OSMand. But it (still? haven't used in a while) does lack some useful features like points of interest…

> For what it's worth: I like Organic Maps for being more lightweight, quicker rendering & simpler configuration than OSMand. But it (still? haven't used in a while) does lack some useful features like points of interest (supermarkets, gas stations & such).

Am I misinterpreting something? This is because of the underlying OSM data. So one should add these places to OSM so downstream apps will show the places you want, right?

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#116

Post by kmarc »

karussell wrote: post #81
kmarc wrote: post #32

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 s…

OSMAnd and OrganicMaps both have the limitation (and big advantage) of functioning offline by default. The routing will be much more powerful (with alternatives on by default) and faster if you enable an online routing service. For OSMAnd this is possible with e.g. GraphHopper: https://www.graphhopper.com/blog/2024/02/27/osmand-with-grap... The same is true for address search. If you have an online address search lik…

Thanks for the input.

I happened to work for a car navigation software development company 15+y ago. Cool stuff, Windows CE / PDAs as devices, android and ios nowhere. These were totally offline devices (map updates through usb / sdcard).

Even then, this offline navigation was super fast, across countries. Today I managed to wait a whole minute for a 5km bike navigation in OsmAnd. Then I uninstalled (after years of hoping for improvement. Yes, I was regularly donating money.)

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#117

Post by ihatehn »

throw738384 wrote: post #46

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…

Hi biodranik! Hope you're well.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#118

Post by kortilla »

lolinder wrote: post #35
netbioserror wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

The philosopher king analogy doesn’t hold water because forking is an option.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#119

Post by kmarc »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #99
kmarc wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other map apps offer different routes between two points, showing the trade-off in time. Organic Maps calculates one route, and it doesn't matter if it's through a deadly car-congested highway. My example is going from Zürich West to Downtown. Here is my experience: * Organic maps: calculates fast, although through a street with a lot of traffic, no alternatives offered. * OsmAnd: takes 5 seconds on a flagship phone…

Out of interest, can you share more accurate start/end points?

Farbhof => Altstadt.

Example: https://mapy.com/en/zakladni?planovani-trasy&rc=98FWsxKe1G98...

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#120

Post by kmarc »

maelito wrote: post #79
kmarc wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other map apps offer different routes between two points, showing the trade-off in time. Organic Maps calculates one route, and it doesn't matter if it's through a deadly car-congested highway. My example is going from Zürich West to Downtown. Here is my experience: * Organic maps: calculates fast, although through a street with a lot of traffic, no alternatives offered. * OsmAnd: takes 5 seconds on a flagship phone…

Care to try brouter for this route ?

I just did, and liked that there are alternatives.
Post reply on HN