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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

#91

Post by palata »

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…

> not because there is a change happening from Organic

They mention financial transparency. I don't know the details, but "we want to know what our donations are used for" is a reasonable request to have, I would say.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#92

Post by mnmalst »

david-gpu wrote: post #78
jraph wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, ok, makes sense! Yeah, getting a nice bike route on OrganicMaps indeed involves some manual app convincing when an obvious bike route exists, I had the exact same thing last week, I agree this could be improved especially given the data is already present in OSM.

Inflexible routing is the reason I'm not using an Organic maps derivative. On OSMAnd I have tweaked the routing algorithm to my taste and it's hard to beat. There is often construction or other temporary issues, so having on-the-fly rerouting that I can trust is key.

How are you tweaking it? Would love to hear more about it since I am a have osmand user.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#93

Post by palata »

medfield wrote: post #40
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…

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 tons of time on it: I contribute data a few times a year. It's better than nothing :-).

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#94

Post by palata »

kmarc wrote: post #41
saubeidl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think is the biggest UX issue with maps.me/organic maps/comaps/whatever?

The biggest for me is definitely the lack of public transportation. This is something even gnome-maps support. Global search (eg. things that are not downloaded yet) only works for some bigger entities, that are part of the world map (although I understand that this would need some server-side support). Not having a satellite map is also a bummer. Point-to-point navigation at places where you already downloaded maps…

> The biggest for me is definitely the lack of public transportation.

I tend to use the official app of the public transports wherever I am. Turns out many of them actually use OSM as a backend :-).

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#95

Post by ravenstine »

saubeidl wrote: post #34
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…

What do you think is the biggest UX issue with maps.me/organic maps/comaps/whatever?

Search. I've wanted to like Organic Maps, but the search function is the absolute pits and forces me to still use Google Maps. Without good search, there's next to no point in me using it.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#96

Post by palata »

maelito wrote: post #38
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…

> If OsmAnd got a new rendering engine (no, not that "3D" sluggish thing it has for a couple years now), like streetcomplete has (or the Strava-built-in mapbox renderer), it would be possibly the best. What "3D sluggish thing" are talking about ? Streetcomplete, like most OSM vector 3D maps use MapLibre, for a few months now https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/pull/5693 Edit : sorry, I read Organic. Inde…

> I don't know why they went for something other than MapLibre.

OSMAnd existed looong before MapLibre :-).

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#97

Post by palata »

throw738384 wrote: post #76
palata wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they sell the company so what? Create another fork and move on. It is opensource, but that does not mean authors can not get some money! Sure, but I think this is what's happening now. Not because they are selling the company, but apparently one issue is that nobody in the community knows where the donations are going. They (CoMaps) complain about transparency regarding finances. I believe this would be a good r…

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, but that's apparently a criticism from the CoMaps dudes.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#98

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

lolinder wrote: post #43

I'm increasingly disaffected by the idea of BDFL-run projects. The concept is appealing—it's essentially Plato's philosopher king. The BDFL can unstick decision making and ensure the project moves forward without having to litigate every decision in committee, they maintain context and vision throughout the life of the project, and because they're not accountable to anyone they can make the right call for the project…

Worth noting the distinction between a BDFL-project and a community project.

A community project's aim is loosey-goosey. The mission, values, governance, ownership/control, etc can change. While there is input from the community, they are often led by one or two dominant personalities. The project can often be pressured into making changes that are actually worse, or don't reflect the views of a collective of contributors and users. (I don't personally know of any community projects that are required to do what a majority opinion from the community asks for. In this sense it is more like a typical "democratic" government where a few powerful leaders are really in charge, rather than "the masses")

A BDFL project is, by definition, one person's project. There is no secret agenda, because there's no need for it to be secret. There's no pressure from anyone, the project just does what the leader wants. This means there usually isn't "controversy" because if you don't like it you can lump it.

Organic Maps is, apparently, not a BDFL project. It is a project represented by a corporation with 3 shareholders: Roman (project founder), Viktor, and Alexander (who is not a shareholder but Viktor supposedly holds his share). The concern in this case is that since it's not a BDFL project, the contributors don't know wtf is going to happen when the shareholders disagree and the "majority" decides to sell the company or something. If it were a BDFL project, the owner could still decide to sell it, but in this case, the project founder actually is on the side of the community.

Personally I'm not aware of true BDFL projects working against the aims of its own community, and BDFLs don't really change what they do. The exception is when money is involved. If somebody's just getting paid to write open source, the project is safe; if somebody's selling the project as a Product, beware. "Money is a motive with a universal adaptor on it."

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#99

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

kmarc wrote: post #55
jraph wrote: post #47

Earlier 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…

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

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#100

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

margalabargala wrote: post #33
bondarchuk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot use OSM by itself for gps navigation on your phone, right?

OSMand works fine for navigation and has for a decade.

OSMand isn't an official OSM app any more than Organic Maps is. It's just that they founded the app before the OSM Foundation got round to thinking about a trademark policy.
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