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. This seems like it'll hurt the community more than if they'd waited until it was necessary.
lolinder · 39s ago
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, incidentally, no different than tyrants than 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 I can be reasonably sure that I won't feel the need to Fork in the future because I have recourse if things go sour.
Stephen304 · 58m ago
> If such a change happens in the future, they can fork then...
Did such a change not already happen with the addition of Kayak affiliate links without any community consultation? It seems to me that there has already been enough to justify a fork.
Not to mention, there was a promise of electing and changing boardmembers which has never happened, and hiding the use of OrganicMaps project donations for personal vacations as alleged by the initial open letter.
rafram · 47m ago
> hiding the use of OrganicMaps project donations for personal vacations as alleged by the initial open letter
Were those donations intended to support the core developers generally? Or were they specifically intended to pay for servers, equipment, etc.?
If it’s the former, a vacation seems like a totally legitimate use. If the latter, not so much.
Stephen304 · 29m ago
> If it’s the former, a vacation seems like a totally legitimate use
Imo hiding that the funds were used even in a legitimate case makes it improper. If it was intended to be paid as a salary then they should have disclosed that $x were paid out as a salary. As I understand it, the only reason we know that the funds left the project was because one of the founders revealed the use of funds by the other founders, not through a planned, transparent, or regular process. In other words, the revelation that funds were being used seemed to be an anomaly as opposed to a regular practice.
The original open letter states essentially as much: "It's fine for developers to be reimbursed for their hard work, but it should be done in a fair, transparent and accountable way."
palata · 1h ago
> 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.
I'm not trying to imply anything with that other than that it seems the original fork seems to have failed in its stated goals of being the community-led, non-commercialized version.
soperj · 55m ago
Neovim is a fork of VIM which was a fork of Stevie which was a fork of vi which was a fork of ed, and it's the piece of software I use probably more than anything.
przmk · 2h ago
I mean... Yeah, why not? That's one of the reasons FOSS is nice: people who are willing to maintain/contribute don't have to put up with a project going rogue.
ano-ther · 4h ago
What’s the backstory?
> There was no real progress in negotiations with Organic Maps shareholders.
> It appears that Viktor is only open to a guarantee not to sell the project, however besides that he wants to retain full control of Organic Maps.
> And Organic Maps future is uncertain still, as the disagreement between shareholders (Viktor and Roman) has not been resolved.
I'm more partial to a BDFL than a committee, so I'm not sure why I'd prefer this fork. Community management is not a de facto improvement.
lolinder · 3h ago
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 if you get a good one (Matz for Ruby, by all accounts). But it's risky, and it's hard to be sure yours is actually benevolent and will stay benevolent.
kortilla · 25m ago
The philosopher king analogy doesn’t hold water because forking is an option.
johannes1234321 · 3h ago
BDFL is a good concept. As long as money stays out of it. If the DFL collects money in a for profit Organisation and isn't transparent about usage, this is unsatisfactory to other contributors.
I am not sure there is a huge market for selling the company, though, given the track record of the owners for taking the money and then forking away and trying to pull the users over.
protimewaster · 3h ago
It sounds like the problem is that they don't trust the BDFL to be B, since they're asking for more financial transparency and a bunch of other stuff.
ChrisMarshallNY · 1h ago
I could have been a BDFL for a project that I authored, but chose against that.
I often say that the best thing that I ever did for the project, was walk away from it. The team that took it over, has made it extremely successful.
kmarc · 3h ago
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 search for something, mistype only one letter (surprise, surprise, that happens a lot on mobile), and you have no chance to get results. Alternative path for your bike route? Forget about it. Rendering is awful, either ugly, or slow, or both.
I am trying to switch to Mapy.com (Mapy.cz before), it's a surprisingly user friendly app, however, not sure how they are going to monetize soon. So far the best on phone, I hope they will push and really become a Maps-replacement. They recently switched from a Czech-focused concept to a proper world-wide map (mapy.com); both web and mobile is great so far. (I am not Czech, and have no relation to mapy, simply really like their app)
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.
pbsurf · 6m ago
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.
karussell · 1h ago
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 like photon the search can be more user friendly. We've put together photon and GraphHopper routing on GraphHopper Maps: https://graphhopper.com/maps/ which you could self-host on your own (i.e. also use offline): https://github.com/karussell/local-maps
GraphHopper Maps is also available on fdroid store or you can install the website as PWA in iOS.
Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of GraphHopper.
_fat_santa · 1h ago
> (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 providers) are far from perfect and the UX is just not the same as it is on Google Maps for example. But with it being a backup app, if I need to open it I don't really care about the limitations, I just need an offline map.
gorfian_robot · 45m ago
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)
kmarc · 26m ago
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 hoping for improvement. Yes, I was regularly donating money.)
mcv · 34m ago
Offline navigation is really nice. The fact that I can use maps and find routes regardless of where I am and what connection I have, is great.
It would be nice to have slightly smarter search, though. That definitely requires improvement. Even just the ordering of the results is terrible sometimes.
onnimonni · 2h ago
Wow, thanks for mentioning https://streetcomplete.app! This looks very intuitive to use for edits on openstreetmaps.
Would someone here know a similiar tool for iOS or MacOS? Or any recommendations to edit roads.
We are currently driving with a 4.5 tonne motorhome in Europe and the road weight and height limits are usually marked properly in osmand+ but when they are not we waste multiple hours rerouting in the alps and I would really want to help the next person in similar situation.
Mentioning it just in case, but openstreetmap.org's web editor (iD) is a good start on Desktop.
There's also EveryDoor [1] which is very nice to edit OSM and they do seem to have an iOS version. Depending on what you want to edit, it can be very handy.
I have not tried the numerous other, more advanced options [2].
Go Map, or just make bookmarks in OsmAnd and go back later
agile-gift0262 · 1h ago
Another alternative to mapy.com you could try is Here WeGo. I prefer it to any other Google Maps alternative I have tried. And there are some things, like the car navigation, that I prefer on it over Google Maps. I don't find their privacy policy creepy, and the most creepy parts are opt-in and the toggle clearly explains what you'd be opting into and what feature you are missing out on by not opting in. Mapy's privacy policy is less creepy than Here's in some aspects, but some of the creepiness that's opt-in in Here, like location data sharing for traffic, it's on with no opting-out on Mapy.
I'd prefer an open-source alternative, but as you said, there isn't any that currently fits my needs.
maelito · 3h ago
> try to search for something, mistype only one letter
Photon is quite good at this, coming with english/french/german plug-and-play. But it's online, so very hard to implement on each user's phone, which is the limitation of Organic and Osmand.
Once you're using Photon or an equivalent project, you need to do a lot more to provide Google's experience :
- itinerary suggestions like "from london to winchester"
- coordinates detection
- handle abbreviations like blvd, in all the languages (Nominatim does it better than Photon, from what I know)
- handle category search, e.g. typing "coffee in Marais" -> a full-text-search won't work taking only the features' name, you need to do some semantic separation of terms
- etc.
> Alternative path for your bike route? Forget about it.
Same pb : offline routing is harder. BRouter is excellent, with lots of alternatives, but online (can be installed on OSMand but it's nerdy).
Disclaimer : I'm working on https://cartes.app, a Web map app. We're using Photon and Brouter, but lots need to be done, including i18n to english, soon I hope !
kmarc · 2h ago
this looks promising, thanks for sharing :-)
medfield · 2h ago
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 it doesnt have all the online social features like google maps and come up with the police/safety warnings and restaurant ratings. I just want its seach to actually find the place I want to go.
Most of the time I try and avoid using google maps, but then I go back and try organic maps. Notice it doesnt have where i want to go listed in its search, so i google the address to plug in. I can enter in the exact address and it wont find it and then go back to google maps.
palata · 1h ago
> 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 :-).
jacekm · 2h ago
> map overlays that are easy to read like more pronounced lane/route arrows
Are you sure the address actually exists on OpenStreetMap? You can add it with StreetComplete (Android) or Go Map (iOS).
mnmalst · 1h ago
I started using osmand a lot more lately while biking and I agree route calculation on the phone (hi Pixel 4a :) ) are super slow but for that reason you can configure alternative (online) routing engines in the settings https://osmand.net/docs/user/navigation/routing/online-routi.... I use https://openrouteservice.org/ which generates long routes in seconds and works great in general.
saubeidl · 3h ago
What do you think is the biggest UX issue with maps.me/organic maps/comaps/whatever?
kmarc · 2h ago
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 is alright (same with osmand), but for exploration, or public trasnport, I would need to use moovit, mapy, osmand (wikipedia overlay is awesome), or google maps.
saubeidl · 2h ago
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?
jraph · 1h ago
They seem to have some sort of experimental support for GTFS [1], and one important part of Transitous is being a GTFS aggregator, so maybe they are not too far away from being able to use that part of Transitous.
Although it'd probably be good to be able to query Transitous itself when online.
Impossible in the medium term, unless Organic goes online.
palata · 1h ago
> 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 :-).
shafyy · 2h ago
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).
stevage · 2h ago
It's almost impossible for anything to compete with Google Maps on business information because they have built such a vast commercial ecosystem around it with advertising, Maps users etc.
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.
rafram · 58m ago
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.
aembleton · 11m ago
They're monetising by requiring payment to download maps for more than one country at a time.
yread · 2h ago
> I am trying to switch to Mapy.com (Mapy.cz before), it's a surprisingly user friendly app, however, not sure how they are going to monetize soon
They now sell premium. Presumably some features (offline maps? or offline navigation? suggest a hike?) will be locked behind premium :-/ They do have great UX though
maelito · 3h ago
> 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.
Edit : sorry, I read Organic. Indeed OSMand is sluggish for me as well. I don't know why they went for something other than MapLibre. It's probably in-house and entangled in their code :/
palata · 1h ago
> I don't know why they went for something other than MapLibre.
OSMAnd existed looong before MapLibre :-).
kmarc · 2h ago
Yes :-)
Streetcomplete is amazing; I understand it provides less polygons to render but it does an absolutely amazing job at it, even when there are thousands of quests.
ihatehn · 39m ago
It also uses online tiles afaik.
maelito · 2h ago
Yes, zooming in is so fast. I'd love to have this experience on mobile Web, we're not quite there yet. I suppose WebGPU is needed ?
mongol · 2h ago
For Android, I have used Locus Maps for many years. It has a somewhat confusing, but very powerful, interface. And I feel the team behind it is committed and engaged. Very worthwhile to try if you haven't.
PufPufPuf · 1h ago
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 links for some time, but recently they added a paid subscription and moved the ability to download offline maps for more than two countries at a time behind a paywall. It seems that they are just now trying to figure out a more sustainable way to monetize, and everyone is hoping they won't destroy the great app in the process.
jraph · 2h ago
> 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.
kmarc · 2h ago
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 to RENDER the current view. I try to avoid zoom and pan. What the hell. Calculating the navigation is either a couple seconds or a minute. The whole UX is totally broken, however, at least you can select to prefer byways / bicycle routes.
* Mapy: fast rendering, fast pathfinding, alternatives offered, configurable to use bike paths.
* Google Maps: totally random what happens, it's a combination of the above (I guess it tries to use live traffic data, too?)
Now the funny thing is that there is an actual signaled bicycle path (which I prefer, since it avoids traffic), and OSM does have this data. None of the app would prefer that path, unfortunately (it's maybe 20 minutes instead of 18 minutes, but much safer).
It feels like most of the apps are hyperfocused on one type of navigation / exploration / feature set (being offline is huge, though), and nothing comes close to Google Maps' "not the best, but delivers alright UX across all these features" approach.
jraph · 2h ago
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.
david-gpu · 1h ago
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.
jraph · 1h ago
> On OSMAnd I have tweaked the routing algorithm to my taste and it's hard to beat.
How do you do this? Is there something I can read or watch about this? Are you using BRouter?
mnmalst · 1h ago
How are you tweaking it? Would love to hear more about it since I am a have osmand user.
Doctor_Fegg · 1h ago
Out of interest, can you share more accurate start/end points?
I just did, and liked that there are alternatives.
nicpottier · 2h ago
I've contributed a few trivial fixes to OrganicMaps and I found them to be pretty responsive and reasonable in their opinions. That doesn't mean I agreed with all the decisions or priorities they make but that's to be expected. Their leadership seemed sane enough to me. It certainly felt like close enough to a BDFL situation to me.
In the research I did, OrganicMaps was the only viable open alternative to something like Gaia and it wasn't particularly close. It does a pretty good job of that, though their map styles leave some things to be desired and meter only topo lines is a bummer.
My limited experience playing around with the codebase made me appreciate that this isn't a small or simple project. It is a huge mixed codebase
of C/Java/etc to share rendering across platforms and even just the map file generation is no small thing.
Color me skeptical that a fork will get off the ground, this seems more likely to me that both projects will struggle for a good while longer. Announcing a fork is easy, delivering something with enough value beyond rhetoric that will draw users over is another.
ihatehn · 31m ago
The good news is that the fork team is a majority of the top contributors outside of the owners, and the owners have been burnt out and embroiled in conflict for months, so I expect the experience to be roughly the same or better going forward. Drawing users is a gradual process no matter what, but isn't really the #1 metric of a FOSS project... active contribution by diverse contributors is, next to usability and popularity.
palata · 2h ago
> Color me skeptical that a fork will get off the ground
Could be, time will tell us. But it works as expected: people can fork if they want to, users can choose which app they use. Users can even use both OrganicMaps and CoMaps if that's better for them!
I currently use OrganicMaps and OSMAnd in parallel, depending on what I do. Works great!
sam_lowry_ · 3h ago
Why do people contribute to Organic Maps and not to OSM?
I always assumed that Organic Maps was a sophisticated way to distribute OSM data, nothing more.
SamWhited · 3h ago
Organic Maps is a way to distribute OSM data, but it also has a lot more than just the OSM maps it uses (code to curate and collect those maps into downloadable packs, code to display them, code to do routing, design assets and resources for the app, documentation, etc.)
You're correct that the maps are OSM though, you can always contribute to OSM and that will also help Organic Maps (or whatever new community based map project comes out!)
RetroTechie · 2h ago
You need both: the map data (OSM project), and software for viewing/using it.
Ideally any app using OSM data would enable contributing to the underlaying map data. But that's probably not how it works.
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).
Would be nice if it were easy to share (offline) map data between apps. Download in app A, backup on sd card , use from app B, C, D, or on other device by swap/copy sd card. Maybe it's possible, but I haven't figured out how (on Android). At least it's not easy/obvious/automatic.
et-al · 27m ago
> 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, right?
pbmonster · 1h ago
> Would be nice if it were easy to share (offline) map data between apps. Download in app A, backup on sd card , use from app B, C, D, or on other device by swap/copy sd card. Maybe it's possible, but I haven't figured out how (on Android).
I'm also really hoping for that. Some kind of local OSM map server that all apps in the ecosystem call to provide geodata.
I run OSMand, StreetComplete, Organic Maps and Magic Earth on my phone. I need all of them to download the exact same geo data. And for convenience reasons, I usually load entire countries. It's so annoying having to download a country in app #3...
maelito · 3h ago
OSM-the-database needs a general public app where contribution is possible to finally be popular.
Organic was seen by many as this app, despite its specific choices like being offline.
Contributing to this app is hence very important for OSM to exist given Google & Apple Maps.
ihatehn · 36m ago
FYI the OSM foundation will probably always be reluctant to sponsor or appear to prefer a certain end-user app. I don't know exactly why, but they really do see themselves as a vendor agnostic database, and don't want to make a popular website or mobile app that actually gets traction any time soon.
But yes I agree with you.
RetroTechie · 2h ago
Option to contribute & offline-first is not mutually exclusive:
Use map data offline, user makes a correction/addition, upload that when app has internet access.
bondarchuk · 3h ago
You cannot use OSM by itself for gps navigation on your phone, right?
palata · 2h ago
OSM is the database containing all the data. Navigation is not exactly "data" that is stored in a database, it's the result of computing a path between two locations based on the data stored in OSM.
Maybe a comparison would be this: if you want to hike somewhere the "old school" way, with a compass and a paper map. You will buy a paper map made by someone else, you will localise yourself on this map, and then you will trace a path between where you are and where you want to go. As you hike, you will update your location on the map (by using e.g. your compass) and choose your next steps accordingly.
In this example, the paper map is not doing any navigation. It doesn't know what GPS is, it doesn't have a compass. It's just map data printed on paper. You are the one making the navigation, right?
- OSM is the paper map.
- Organic Maps, or OSMAnd, or whatever app you use as a frontend to OSM is "the navigator" (you).
Does that help?
margalabargala · 3h ago
OSMand works fine for navigation and has for a decade.
bondarchuk · 3h ago
Thanks for the rec, I had somehow never really considered osmand being content with organicmaps. But it "is an independent app not endorsed by the OpenStreetMap Foundation" so not really relevant to the GPs point, right?
Doctor_Fegg · 1h ago
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.
Freak_NL · 3h ago
Do you mean 'contribute' or 'donate'? Contributing fixes, bug reports, and code to FOSS projects using OpenStreetMap data makes sense to me, if they do something you appreciate.
lolinder · 2h ago
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 rather than having to make complicated political trade-offs. It's all the perks of a monarchy.
Unfortunately, we've seen over and over again that the BDFL model also has all the problems of monarchy. If you get a good one it's the most effective form of government, but people are fickle things. Frequently we see things like this, where the BDFL turns out to have been malevolent after all or decided that they are the project and are entitled to the sole profit from it. WordPress comes to mind.
A good BDFL is worth keeping, but I think we'll find that drawing inspiration for our community structures from real-world democracies/republics will be more stable and reliable in the long term and more generalizable across new projects. Democracies aren't perfect, but by design they smooth out the variance of the individual humans in the community, giving you much more predictable results over time than monarchies do.
gus_massa · 2h ago
You can't fork a country, but you can fork a open source project. Remember to not sign an CLA that gives superpowers to the current BDFL.
So it's more like herding cats instead of nuking everyone that decides to ignore the presidencial orders or not paying taxes.
lolinder · 2h ago
Forks introduce chaos and are sometimes impossible. If WordPress had a different government structure from the beginning Matt would not be in power anymore, but because it's a dictator for life he's still there and the community has decided to put up with him rather than risk the chaos of a fork.
No one is happy about it, but collective action is hard when it's not baked into the system.
0xbadcafebee · 1h ago
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."
neilv · 2h ago
Something I often wonder about forks, just as good practice...
Is anyone from the Organic Maps and OSM contributor communities familiar with the people forking this, and can vouch for their intentions and the necessity of forking?
How do we get confidence in that?
ihatehn · 28m ago
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.
shark1 · 3h ago
OrganicMaps is such a great app. I did not know it was owned by this type of organisation.
I hope they sort it out.
whorleater · 3h ago
A fork of a fork I guess, Organic Maps was originally `maps.me`, and I suppose we're forking it again
palata · 2h ago
Yep... but I don't see it as a problem. Maybe CoMaps become the new thing, maybe Organic Maps changes and stays...
The very fact that a fork can be made is good for the users. It doesn't mean that users have to follow the latest fork, though.
throw738384 · 2h ago
I would add a few points:
* Organic Maps devs are from Belarus, company is registered in Estonia. This is very difficult setup already, and I can imagine authors just want simplest setup possible. Perhaps they do not want to waste energy on nonprofit that is very very difficult and expensive to do internationally!
* 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!
* Biggest expense for Organic Maps is hosting and mirroring map data. Is this fork going to use (and pay) their own servers?
* Is there list of developers and contributors behind this fork? I only found "us" and "we" and "community"!
wertik12 · 2h ago
The thing is that there is an ongoing conflict between owners of Organic Maps OU itself. Due to ownership structure this leads to block of development etc for a long time already, so some existing contributors (that are not a part of OM OU business entity) started a fork.
ihatehn · 25m ago
Hi biodranik! Hope you're well.
palata · 2h ago
> 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 reason to fork.
throw738384 · 1h ago
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 guess they can use those.
palata · 1h ago
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.
evolve2k · 2h ago
A few people are talking about multiple issues in the open mapping space.
Today (bear with me), I was looking at a tool called SwiftWave it lets you run your own Platform as a Service. The only reason I mention it is that I found interesting how they’ve really broken the problem domain into a series of smaller open source projects.
I’d love some folk riffing on how this may help, surely nice interfaces for cycling vs driving vs public transport don’t need to be reinvented across projects. How can diff apps work as an ecosystem to allow the brining together of more sophisticated apps that mirror the feature set of the large funded maps apps?
RetroTechie · 3h ago
Sad how much good stuff gets destroyed by non-benevolent dictators and/or greed.
Let's hope a community-led fork does so well that OM becomes a footnote in history. Or it causes OM owners to make a U-turn (but who cares @ this point. Just go ahead with community-led effort).
Would need a new name though. How about a public-is-invited contest?
Freak_NL · 3h ago
> Would need a new name though. How about a public-is-invited contest?
What's the difference between Organic Maps/this and OSMAnd?
dagw · 2h ago
OSMAnd has more advanced features and settings and things you can configure, but at the expense of a nice user friendly out of the box experience. Organic Maps (and thus this project) aimed to produce a more user friendly and streamlined app focusing on usability over lots of features.
atkirtland · 1h ago
The thing that keeps on Organic Maps instead of OSMAnd is how slow it is.
ForHackernews · 3h ago
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?
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, incidentally, no different than tyrants than 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 I can be reasonably sure that I won't feel the need to Fork in the future because I have recourse if things go sour.
Did such a change not already happen with the addition of Kayak affiliate links without any community consultation? It seems to me that there has already been enough to justify a fork.
Not to mention, there was a promise of electing and changing boardmembers which has never happened, and hiding the use of OrganicMaps project donations for personal vacations as alleged by the initial open letter.
Were those donations intended to support the core developers generally? Or were they specifically intended to pay for servers, equipment, etc.?
If it’s the former, a vacation seems like a totally legitimate use. If the latter, not so much.
Imo hiding that the funds were used even in a legitimate case makes it improper. If it was intended to be paid as a salary then they should have disclosed that $x were paid out as a salary. As I understand it, the only reason we know that the funds left the project was because one of the founders revealed the use of funds by the other founders, not through a planned, transparent, or regular process. In other words, the revelation that funds were being used seemed to be an anomaly as opposed to a regular practice.
The original open letter states essentially as much: "It's fine for developers to be reimbursed for their hard work, but it should be done in a fair, transparent and accountable way."
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.
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?
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 was no real progress in negotiations with Organic Maps shareholders.
> It appears that Viktor is only open to a guarantee not to sell the project, however besides that he wants to retain full control of Organic Maps.
> And Organic Maps future is uncertain still, as the disagreement between shareholders (Viktor and Roman) has not been resolved.
The BDFL archetype is basically Plato's philosopher king. It's a nice and appealing idea in theory, and works well if you get a good one (Matz for Ruby, by all accounts). But it's risky, and it's hard to be sure yours is actually benevolent and will stay benevolent.
I am not sure there is a huge market for selling the company, though, given the track record of the owners for taking the money and then forking away and trying to pull the users over.
I often say that the best thing that I ever did for the project, was walk away from it. The team that took it over, has made it extremely successful.
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 search for something, mistype only one letter (surprise, surprise, that happens a lot on mobile), and you have no chance to get results. Alternative path for your bike route? Forget about it. Rendering is awful, either ugly, or slow, or both.
I am trying to switch to Mapy.com (Mapy.cz before), it's a surprisingly user friendly app, however, not sure how they are going to monetize soon. So far the best on phone, I hope they will push and really become a Maps-replacement. They recently switched from a Czech-focused concept to a proper world-wide map (mapy.com); both web and mobile is great so far. (I am not Czech, and have no relation to mapy, simply really like their app)
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.
The same is true for address search. If you have an online address search like photon the search can be more user friendly. We've put together photon and GraphHopper routing on GraphHopper Maps: https://graphhopper.com/maps/ which you could self-host on your own (i.e. also use offline): https://github.com/karussell/local-maps
GraphHopper Maps is also available on fdroid store or you can install the website as PWA in iOS.
Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of GraphHopper.
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 providers) are far from perfect and the UX is just not the same as it is on Google Maps for example. But with it being a backup app, if I need to open it I don't really care about the limitations, I just need an offline map.
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 hoping for improvement. Yes, I was regularly donating money.)
It would be nice to have slightly smarter search, though. That definitely requires improvement. Even just the ordering of the results is terrible sometimes.
Would someone here know a similiar tool for iOS or MacOS? Or any recommendations to edit roads.
We are currently driving with a 4.5 tonne motorhome in Europe and the road weight and height limits are usually marked properly in osmand+ but when they are not we waste multiple hours rerouting in the alps and I would really want to help the next person in similar situation.
There's also EveryDoor [1] which is very nice to edit OSM and they do seem to have an iOS version. Depending on what you want to edit, it can be very handy.
I have not tried the numerous other, more advanced options [2].
[1] https://every-door.app/
[2] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Editors
I'd prefer an open-source alternative, but as you said, there isn't any that currently fits my needs.
Photon is quite good at this, coming with english/french/german plug-and-play. But it's online, so very hard to implement on each user's phone, which is the limitation of Organic and Osmand.
Once you're using Photon or an equivalent project, you need to do a lot more to provide Google's experience : - itinerary suggestions like "from london to winchester" - coordinates detection - handle abbreviations like blvd, in all the languages (Nominatim does it better than Photon, from what I know) - handle category search, e.g. typing "coffee in Marais" -> a full-text-search won't work taking only the features' name, you need to do some semantic separation of terms - etc.
> Alternative path for your bike route? Forget about it.
Same pb : offline routing is harder. BRouter is excellent, with lots of alternatives, but online (can be installed on OSMand but it's nerdy).
Disclaimer : I'm working on https://cartes.app, a Web map app. We're using Photon and Brouter, but lots need to be done, including i18n to english, soon I hope !
But my biggest gripe with using organic maps with driving is its search function. I couldnt care if it doesnt have all the online social features like google maps and come up with the police/safety warnings and restaurant ratings. I just want its seach to actually find the place I want to go.
Most of the time I try and avoid using google maps, but then I go back and try organic maps. Notice it doesnt have where i want to go listed in its search, so i google the address to plug in. I can enter in the exact address and it wont find it and then go back to google maps.
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 :-).
Try Magic Earth https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.generalmag...
Point-to-point navigation at places where you already downloaded maps is alright (same with osmand), but for exploration, or public trasnport, I would need to use moovit, mapy, osmand (wikipedia overlay is awesome), or google maps.
Although it'd probably be good to be able to query Transitous itself when online.
[1] https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/blob/master/docs/...
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 :-).
https://2019.stateofthemap.org/sessions/LBGPCD/
Unfortunately it didn't take off, was discountinued in 2023.
https://github.com/OpenPlaceReviews
They now sell premium. Presumably some features (offline maps? or offline navigation? suggest a hike?) will be locked behind premium :-/ They do have great UX though
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. Indeed OSMand is sluggish for me as well. I don't know why they went for something other than MapLibre. It's probably in-house and entangled in their code :/
OSMAnd existed looong before MapLibre :-).
Streetcomplete is amazing; I understand it provides less polygons to render but it does an absolutely amazing job at it, even when there are thousands of quests.
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.
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 to RENDER the current view. I try to avoid zoom and pan. What the hell. Calculating the navigation is either a couple seconds or a minute. The whole UX is totally broken, however, at least you can select to prefer byways / bicycle routes.
* Mapy: fast rendering, fast pathfinding, alternatives offered, configurable to use bike paths.
* Google Maps: totally random what happens, it's a combination of the above (I guess it tries to use live traffic data, too?)
Now the funny thing is that there is an actual signaled bicycle path (which I prefer, since it avoids traffic), and OSM does have this data. None of the app would prefer that path, unfortunately (it's maybe 20 minutes instead of 18 minutes, but much safer).
It feels like most of the apps are hyperfocused on one type of navigation / exploration / feature set (being offline is huge, though), and nothing comes close to Google Maps' "not the best, but delivers alright UX across all these features" approach.
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.
There is often construction or other temporary issues, so having on-the-fly rerouting that I can trust is key.
How do you do this? Is there something I can read or watch about this? Are you using BRouter?
Example: https://mapy.com/en/zakladni?planovani-trasy&rc=98FWsxKe1G98...
In the research I did, OrganicMaps was the only viable open alternative to something like Gaia and it wasn't particularly close. It does a pretty good job of that, though their map styles leave some things to be desired and meter only topo lines is a bummer.
My limited experience playing around with the codebase made me appreciate that this isn't a small or simple project. It is a huge mixed codebase of C/Java/etc to share rendering across platforms and even just the map file generation is no small thing.
Color me skeptical that a fork will get off the ground, this seems more likely to me that both projects will struggle for a good while longer. Announcing a fork is easy, delivering something with enough value beyond rhetoric that will draw users over is another.
Could be, time will tell us. But it works as expected: people can fork if they want to, users can choose which app they use. Users can even use both OrganicMaps and CoMaps if that's better for them!
I currently use OrganicMaps and OSMAnd in parallel, depending on what I do. Works great!
I always assumed that Organic Maps was a sophisticated way to distribute OSM data, nothing more.
You're correct that the maps are OSM though, you can always contribute to OSM and that will also help Organic Maps (or whatever new community based map project comes out!)
Ideally any app using OSM data would enable contributing to the underlaying map data. But that's probably not how it works.
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).
Would be nice if it were easy to share (offline) map data between apps. Download in app A, backup on sd card , use from app B, C, D, or on other device by swap/copy sd card. Maybe it's possible, but I haven't figured out how (on Android). At least it's not easy/obvious/automatic.
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, right?
I'm also really hoping for that. Some kind of local OSM map server that all apps in the ecosystem call to provide geodata.
I run OSMand, StreetComplete, Organic Maps and Magic Earth on my phone. I need all of them to download the exact same geo data. And for convenience reasons, I usually load entire countries. It's so annoying having to download a country in app #3...
Organic was seen by many as this app, despite its specific choices like being offline.
Contributing to this app is hence very important for OSM to exist given Google & Apple Maps.
But yes I agree with you.
Use map data offline, user makes a correction/addition, upload that when app has internet access.
Maybe a comparison would be this: if you want to hike somewhere the "old school" way, with a compass and a paper map. You will buy a paper map made by someone else, you will localise yourself on this map, and then you will trace a path between where you are and where you want to go. As you hike, you will update your location on the map (by using e.g. your compass) and choose your next steps accordingly.
In this example, the paper map is not doing any navigation. It doesn't know what GPS is, it doesn't have a compass. It's just map data printed on paper. You are the one making the navigation, right?
- OSM is the paper map.
- Organic Maps, or OSMAnd, or whatever app you use as a frontend to OSM is "the navigator" (you).
Does that help?
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 rather than having to make complicated political trade-offs. It's all the perks of a monarchy.
Unfortunately, we've seen over and over again that the BDFL model also has all the problems of monarchy. If you get a good one it's the most effective form of government, but people are fickle things. Frequently we see things like this, where the BDFL turns out to have been malevolent after all or decided that they are the project and are entitled to the sole profit from it. WordPress comes to mind.
A good BDFL is worth keeping, but I think we'll find that drawing inspiration for our community structures from real-world democracies/republics will be more stable and reliable in the long term and more generalizable across new projects. Democracies aren't perfect, but by design they smooth out the variance of the individual humans in the community, giving you much more predictable results over time than monarchies do.
So it's more like herding cats instead of nuking everyone that decides to ignore the presidencial orders or not paying taxes.
No one is happy about it, but collective action is hard when it's not baked into the system.
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."
Is anyone from the Organic Maps and OSM contributor communities familiar with the people forking this, and can vouch for their intentions and the necessity of forking?
How do we get confidence in that?
The very fact that a fork can be made is good for the users. It doesn't mean that users have to follow the latest fork, though.
* Organic Maps devs are from Belarus, company is registered in Estonia. This is very difficult setup already, and I can imagine authors just want simplest setup possible. Perhaps they do not want to waste energy on nonprofit that is very very difficult and expensive to do internationally!
* 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!
* Biggest expense for Organic Maps is hosting and mirroring map data. Is this fork going to use (and pay) their own servers?
* Is there list of developers and contributors behind this fork? I only found "us" and "we" and "community"!
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 reason to fork.
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 guess they can use those.
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.
Today (bear with me), I was looking at a tool called SwiftWave it lets you run your own Platform as a Service. The only reason I mention it is that I found interesting how they’ve really broken the problem domain into a series of smaller open source projects.
https://swiftwave.org/docs/contribution_guideline
I’d love some folk riffing on how this may help, surely nice interfaces for cycling vs driving vs public transport don’t need to be reinvented across projects. How can diff apps work as an ecosystem to allow the brining together of more sophisticated apps that mirror the feature set of the large funded maps apps?
Let's hope a community-led fork does so well that OM becomes a footnote in history. Or it causes OM owners to make a U-turn (but who cares @ this point. Just go ahead with community-led effort).
Would need a new name though. How about a public-is-invited contest?
Like the one linked to in the article?
https://codeberg.org/comaps/Governance/issues/34
[0] https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps