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?
Yes, it is fork of a fork.
A community-led fork of Organic Maps
181–190 of 217 posts
Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps
#182The 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…
> Apes Together Strong
Absolutely 100% agree with your statement, Linux desktop is the perfect example of that. You get a billion different distribution that all comes from debian, arch and maybe fedora but that's all.
In my opinion, there should be 3 Linux distribution. That's all.
For instance Ubuntu: Yeah Ubuntu gnome suck, yeah canonical push snap package when flappack are better but do you really need a new distribution because of that ?
Perfection is the enemy of progress. And when things go all bad and you have used all other alternative, then and only then forking should be considered. Like a nuclear button.
Currently i feel like it's more often used by newcomer that want to get to the lead position of a project they are passionate about but didn't start, so they fork and get a fraction of the community behind. It's not much but it's still a bit.
Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps
#183Earlier 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…
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.
Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, but that would be miles behind G/A maps, on top of being hard to implement. E.g. Motis needs walk routing data that weights hundred of gigas.
Question is what it's for. A proper transport layer on the map would be valuable to me. Even without timetable data. That's even in relations on openstreetmap already.
Next improvement might be to highlight lines based on frequency of service. Still possible to precalculate with little need on device.
Routing ain't easy. That's true.
Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you think is the biggest UX issue with maps.me/organic maps/comaps/whatever?
Not an UX thing, but I find myself going back to Google Maps to find restaurants, reviews and reliable opening hours all the time. Neither Apple Maps nor Organic Maps offers the same level of quality (not to say that Google Maps reviews can be problematic in themselves).
And at least back when I tried it a long time ago, it wouldn't pull in updates from OSM in a timely manner. Like I updated something in OSM and a month later it still wasn't available in organic maps. Maybe it is better now?
Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Apes Together Strong Absolutely 100% agree with your statement, Linux desktop is the perfect example of that. You get a billion different distribution that all comes from debian, arch and maybe fedora but that's all. In my opinion, there should be 3 Linux distribution. That's all. For instance Ubuntu: Yeah Ubuntu gnome suck, yeah canonical push snap package when flappack are better but do you really need a new dist…
Un(?)fortunately, us Organic Maps forkers have been with the project since Organic Maps was OMaps, and before. The only people with more commits than the senior fork member are the OM co-owners themselves. We really tried getting OM to deliver on their promises, but it seems silence is preferable to accountability for them.
Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but that would be miles behind G/A maps, on top of being hard to implement. E.g. Motis needs walk routing data that weights hundred of gigas.
Question is what it's for. A proper transport layer on the map would be valuable to me. Even without timetable data. That's even in relations on openstreetmap already. Next improvement might be to highlight lines based on frequency of service. Still possible to precalculate with little need on device. Routing ain't easy. That's true.
We'd love to have your input for improved transit in CoMaps! I agree it's an important priority. Last GSoC there was a project for ingesting GTFS feeds against OSM data, since local agencies are often much better about their details than OSM is, but as a student project it was slow and limited in scope.
Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> I don't know why Google does so much worse with trails than OSM, but it really does.
I expect that Google never saw a market in trail mapping. I also assume no Google employee took an interest in trails as a 10% project. Google Maps doesn't really do much for topography either.
Google Earth can be good for trail mapping, but that has basically atrophied since it was acquired from Keyhole.
Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> I don't know why Google does so much worse with trails than OSM, but it really does. I expect that Google never saw a market in trail mapping. I also assume no Google employee took an interest in trails as a 10% project. Google Maps doesn't really do much for topography either. Google Earth can be good for trail mapping, but that has basically atrophied since it was acquired from Keyhole.
Yeah, but the thing is that I don't think any of this data is "self-collected". I suspect that OSM gets most of its US trail data (or at least western state trail data) from the National Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. I also suspect that incorporating such a data source into Google Maps is relatively trivial, but they just seemed to have done so.
Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps
#190Earlier 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…
> (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…
I know this probably doesn't solve the same issue, but google maps has a offline feature. Click your profile picture (on mobile), pick offline maps, ....