I'm not sure I understand why an open source maps app needs shareholders in the first place?
A community-led fork of Organic Maps
161–170 of 217 posts
Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps
#162Again? 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?
> 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:Un...
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
Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps
#163Sad 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…
Slightly off topic but I would really want to see DuckDB based alternative of https://pgrouting.org.
It's so easy to embed duckdb anywhere. Current smartphones already have enough CPU juice to handle almost anything and duckdb can query and cache geoparquet files eg from the Overture maps.
Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Alternative path for your bike route? Forget about it. What do you mean? It's possible to add intermediate stops to shape your route. Or do you mean something else? With you on the search not being forgiving enough.
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…
> it's maybe 20 minutes instead of 18 minutes, but much safer).
I can't see how a bike would ever be safer than a car when looking at stats.
Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (and big advantage) of functioning offline by default. I don't know about others but that's the main reason I use it. My day to day mapping app is still Google Maps but I always keep a copy of Organic Maps with downloaded maps of wherever I'm going as a backup. While I do not use it often, it's gotten me out of a couple of sticky situations while camping and roadtripping. Organic Maps (and other offline mapping pro…
same same. and I often find Organic Maps has hiking trails etc fairly well indicated where Google does not (even if I have cell service)
I think this is less Organic vs Google than OpenStreetMap's data set vs Google's. I don't know why Google does so much worse with trails than OSM, but it really does.
Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's not my experience at all, for shops and restaurants (opening hours, menus, photos, ratings) I always need to use Google Maps. And even then, a "practical monopoly" does not mean anything unless you monetize it...
Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps
#167The 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…
A difference between Wordpress and Organic Maps, though, is that Wordpress is a framework whereas Organic Maps is an application. Switching to a fork of Wordpress means a different extension marketplace, various config files that may need to be changed, etc. Switching to a fork of Organic Maps is just downloading a different app that does the same thing.
Completely irrespective of the governance structure of Organic Maps, by its nature it is much more easily forkable than something like Wordpress.
Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps
#168Sad 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…
> The routing will be much more powerful (with alternatives on by default) and faster if you enable an online routing service.
What is the essential reason that online routing has an advantage over local routing, if the data is all available locally anyway? Is it that you need an index, and that index is large and/or very time-consuming to produce, and hence not viable to store/generate on-device after each map data update?
Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps
#169I'm not sure I understand why an open source maps app needs shareholders in the first place?
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!
Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
It it not just because of underlying OSM data. Navigation apps such as OrganicMaps and OsmAnd filter OSM data, and package it in way that takes up less space. I.e., it will omit individual trees, manholes, etc. It also omits tags from OSM objects that it does keep. This is all to to make it possible to fit enough maps on a phone and also there have code that can use that data (for searching and displaying) Take for e…
Keep a list of those missing tags, it's worth filing an issue for adding support in the future!