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A community-led fork of Organic Maps

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Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#121

Post by aembleton »

rafram wrote: post #102
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…

I'm not that worried about Mapy.cz/.com becoming useless unless you pay, to be honest. (Maybe they'll make me look foolish for that.) The developer is Seznam, which is kind of like the Czech homegrown equivalent of Google/Craigslist/Zillow. I assume they monetize in pretty much the same way: ads, enterprise, API fees.

They're monetising by requiring payment to download maps for more than one country at a time.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#122

Post by pbsurf »

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…

I'm working on https://github.com/styluslabs/maps/ including a new 3D map engine (based on Tangram-ES) and JS plugin support, so while there is no offline routing yet, support for additional online routing services can be added by users.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#123

Post by lolinder »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #86

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. Thi…

I think that the open source community is too quick to make "just fork it later" the answer to all our governance woes.

Look at the state of WordPress: the (B?)DFL actively bans people from the community for critiquing his self-described "nuclear war" waged against his biggest competitor in the hosting space, which "nuclear war" has caught thousands of members of the community in the crossfire. And yet we see no fork. Why? Because forking is hard and fragments the community, so people would rather put up with a tyrant than deal with the risk of instability. This is no different than tyrants in any other environment.

If a project has good governance established from the beginning, including a reasonably democratic process for contributors to elect the executive function, then the community can be reasonably sure that they won't feel the need to fork in the future because they have recourse if things go sour.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#124

Post by lolinder »

kortilla wrote: post #118
lolinder wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#125

Post by throw738384 »

PufPufPuf wrote: post #101
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…

I'm Czech, and a long time user of Mapy.cz / Mapy.com. Monetization of Mapy.com has been a question for some time. It's part of the Seznam conglomerate, which makes most of its money through various news sites (including a TV channel) and an ad platform. Other "side projects" of Seznam, like their e-mail service, serve as drivers for their homepage and stay completely free. Mapy.cz contained affiliate Booking.com lin…

Mapy.cz was profitable before, they have practical monopoly on Czech market due shop data (opening hours, menus, user reviews). Recent monetization is just squeeze.

Btw hiking data are a bit obsolete for other countries. They have fork from OSM that is a few years behind.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#126

Post by johannes1234321 »

palata wrote: post #93
medfield wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I use organic maps for hiking, because its just simple offline trail mapping. I want a mapping program in my car to easily be offline, have map overlays that are easy to read like more pronounced lane/route arrows and can re route if there is a road shut down or a backup on the expressway and I go to get off. But my biggest gripe with using organic maps with driving is its search function. I couldnt care if i…

> Notice it doesnt have where i want to go listed in its search I live in an area where OSM is really good with that (just because people contributed the data). If your area is less complete, it feels like it's a good opportunity to contribute! There are many apps that will help you contribute to the map, or you can do it directly from the website: https://www.openstreetmap.org . It doesn't mean you need to spend ton…

It's not only about being tagged in Openstreetmap, it's about the search algorithm finding the relevant entry from ambiguous entry. Dealing with cases where things are spelled slightly differently (abbreviations etc.) or finding the relevant entry when common terms are used in names or search just by category.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#127

Post by karussell »

kmarc wrote: post #116
karussell wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

I'm not saying that they cannot improve :)

Just that comparing Google and OSMAnd/OrganicMaps in terms of routing alternatives & speed and powerful address search is not 100% fair (even when they'd use the same data source which they don't)

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#129

Post by johannes1234321 »

maelito wrote: post #74
saubeidl wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh that's a great callout. I did some quick research and it appears Gnome's public transport feature is powered by https://transitous.org/ - I wonder how much work it would be to add this to Organic Maps?

Impossible in the medium term, unless Organic goes online.

There is a lot one could do offline. Highlight close by stations, have overlays/styles for transport focus (they got an overlay for "Subway", which in some areas includes commuter trains but not for bus/tram/light rail/...)

And in theory one could add bundles of data based on GTFS data which many transport organisations these days publish and do routing at least based on schedule times.

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