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A community-led fork of Organic Maps

comaps.app

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Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#141

Post by apitman »

lolinder wrote: post #123
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…

Forkability is an underused metric when evaluating an open source tool.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#142

Post by kmarc »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #134
kmarc wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks - that's really interesting. Which route would you personally recommend? (My interest is that I run cycle.travel, which currently finds this route: https://cycle.travel/map?from=&to=&fromLL=47.390987,8.478737... . I'm not entirely happy with it in this case though - for example, it's not routing onto the cycle path south of the railway on Aargauerstrasse, I think perhaps some of the paths leading onto/off it a…

This would more or less follow the brown-signaled bike path at Letziground:

https://cycle.travel/map?from=&to=&fromLL=47.390987,8.478737...

(I can't tell by heart how it is beyond that, I just follow the signs :-) )

But cycle.travel seems truly amazing! It's super fast to add detours.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#143

Post by lioeters »

lolinder wrote: post #124
kortilla wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

https://www.classicpress.net/

https://whitelabelpress.org/

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#144

Post by will-bradley »

neilv wrote: post #136
ihatehn wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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-shareho...

Here's the CoMaps governance repo for deciding on decisionmaking: https://codeberg.org/comaps/Governance/ and the leadership here https://codeberg.org/org/comaps/members vs top contributors to OM since the Maps.me fork: 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/ -- 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!

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#145

Post by will-bradley »

palata wrote: post #97
throw738384 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, that's all fine. What I am saying is that CoMaps seem to believe that Organic-Maps-the-Company is not transparent about what they do with the donations. They have a bunch of other reasons, but this is the one that I can understand. I can understand that they don't want to donate money to Organic-Maps-the-Company if it then uses it to write proprietary code and later sell it. Not that they necessarily do that, b…

Also with mobile apps, app store users are the most "valuable" thing -- much like Maps.Me, the "app" could be sold tomorrow and what really happens is the FOSS code is thrown away or sunsetted and the users wake up to an update where their map app is now a crypto scam, or whatever. The source code can be forked, but Organic Maps "owns" millions of app store users, and can "sell" that, in a way that violates users' trust. Us volunteer developers are very against that, but unable to stop it besides protesting.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#146

Post by will-bradley »

conception wrote: post #5

Site still prompts to install organic maps app on mobile.

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.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#148

Post by will-bradley »

carlosjobim wrote: post #16
bondarchuk wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now they're forking it, what's the big deal?

They're still going to work for free, and they're still going to be angry about it.

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.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#149

Post by mpol »

lolinder wrote: post #123
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…

If I understand correctly, there is work going in inside the WordPress community. Not sure if and when things will happen, I am not involved personally.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#150

Post by neilv »

will-bradley wrote: post #144
neilv wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 exac…

I don't know why your comment was dead, so I vouched and upvoted it.

Thanks for those helpful comments about this particular fork. It's a good example for a question about best practices for our field.

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