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 no different than tyrants in 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 the community can be reasonably sure that they won't feel the need to fork in the future because they have recourse if things go sour.
Completely irrespective of the governance structure of Organic Maps, by its nature it is much more easily forkable than something like Wordpress.
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.
Initially I instinctively agreed with you - certainly there's too many fragmentation in the Linux distro space!
Then I recalled I use NixOs, and it probably didn't make it to your top 3...
Technically you can install nix package manager on Debian, and what is nixos main interest without it's package manager ?
In practice yes, since Canonical is replacing essential system components to depend on snap. So you can't just "not use it", you're forced to be dependent on their upstream package hosting service that you can't rehost yourself.
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.
Would you shovel dirt in a community garden project if you know the guy on top will eventually turn it into a commercial business? That means your work wasn't going towards a nice community garden as you thought, but it was going towards one guy being too stingy to actually pay labour. Sure maybe that guy didn't know he would do that from the beginning, but what difference would it make?
Governance does matter.
> 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.
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 permanently weaken our community when we inevitably need to trigger a succession?
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.
And forking is like civil war.
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.
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 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
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 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.
So few people hike these trails that I do not believe they were entered one by one. The one "trail" I hiked that was entered by someone I deleted later that day, because it should not have been shown as a trail.
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.)
Maybe it is a matter of quality. Because of course you can find routes fast if they are not the fastest or best routes.
But there is room for improvement. brouter could be integrated even better. Or a router like that could be used directly in OsmAnd.
And long routes could be handled more flexible. E.g., when I go from Copenhagen to Barcelona, it is not super important at first to find the optimal way into Barcelona, or shortcuts in France using regional roads. It will take several days, but I would like to start with a reasonable route giving me an estimate of distance and time. At first I just need a good route to the Great Belt Bridge or the Rødby ferry -- Copenhagen is on an island.
When I drive long distances, I sometimes use several devices. The Xzent system is much faster for longer distances, but the map is not as good, especially it is missing may POI's.
Often they disagree, especially if one is optimizing for distance and other for fuel or time. Then if there is an obstacle or a bad road, I instantly have a good alternative at an intersection.
Just that comparing Google and OSMAnd/OrganicMaps in terms of routing alternatives & speed and powerful address search is not 100% fair (even when they'd use the same data source which they don't)
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?
To me it feels like OSMAnd heavily prioritizes feature develompent over performance, which is fair enough but still annoying.
It would be nice to have slightly smarter search, though. That definitely requires improvement. Even just the ordering of the results is terrible sometimes.
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 !
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].
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...
I'd prefer an open-source alternative, but as you said, there isn't any that currently fits my needs.
It would be immense for an open source project to exist, but I'll happily settle for a non-google one.
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/...
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.
E.g. Motis needs walk routing data that weights hundred of gigas.
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.
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.
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 :/
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.
OSMAnd existed looong before MapLibre :-).
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.
Btw hiking data are a bit obsolete for other countries. They have fork from OSM that is a few years behind.
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?
[0] https://osmand.net/docs/technical/osmand-file-formats/osmand...
[1] https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd-resources/blob/master/ro...
[0] https://osmand.net/docs/technical/osmand-file-formats/osmand...
[1] https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd-resources/blob/master/ro...
Example: https://mapy.com/en/zakladni?planovani-trasy&rc=98FWsxKe1G98...
(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 are rather fussily mapped.)
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.
I can't see how a bike would ever be safer than a car when looking at stats.
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.
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...
Also, mobile apps often have strict privacy lately around what files they can access: they're not just sitting on the filesystem, they're in access-controlled app-specific folders. That's good for privacy/security, but a dealbreaker for first-class sharing of information between apps.
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?
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 example Motorhome stopovers (I have edited at lot of those). OsmAnd has name, opening, hours, power_supply, fees, dump_stations, toilets, showers, phone numbers, website, and a few more tags. But not water_point (although it has drinking_water which is not used much for stopovers).
OrganicMap has much fewer tags for motorhome stopovers.
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.
sophisticated way to distribute OSM data also needs development efforts
this is not an easy or trivial project
there are also numerous other FOSS projects in OSM ecosystem
mapping itself and improving map data is also very welcome, obviously!
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?
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!
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."
Project direction can change in any case. Even against user's wishes.
The difference: in a community-led project, it's usually >1 person at the helm. And those leaders can put themselves at risk of being replaced by their community. Which at least puts a cap on how much they can push through their own decisions.
A benevolent dictator doesn't have this problem. And therefore can move easier.
But it's a fine line, and very easy to run foul of the "benevolent" part @ some point. Few DFLs manage this long-term.
Not to mention that over time, a community's desired project direction may simple diverge from project leader's vision. Pet project with a handful like-minded contributors != big project with many users & contributors.
* 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.
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.
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 thing being forked could also respond to these clear assertion, which could be a check against confusing forks that are bad-faith, ill-conceived, not necessarily aligned, etc.
(Of course, when I hear of a fork, I instantly assume that there was probably a good reason, and there usually is, but always assuming that is a mistake, which exposes us another way to bad actor risk.)
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!
Thanks for those helpful comments about this particular fork. It's a good example for a question about best practices for our field.
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?
Even legally, there are questions here, not to mention the "high community principles".
"The original design was created by me. I also personally hired and paid for a designer to also work on the design. Later I hired a developer and paid him myself to develop the website. Recently minor updates were made, for example removing the stock photos from the Community page, which was paid by OM. This was from the beginning through today open source under the Apache license."
Afaik what Organic Maps (and plenty of notable projects) have done is above board in terms of law and licensing, and reasonable people may differ on the ethics. I don't even think it should be impossible to do what they did. It just strikes me that we should all be on the same page from the start, especially so that volunteer labour doesn't end up being commercialised or locked down in a way the contributor reasonably didn't expect. This is important because burning volunteers hurts FOSS (not to mention the cost to users).
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?