QUO VADIS: Organic Maps gets community fork
The three stakeholders behind Organic Maps have apparently fallen out and are seeking a ‘divorce’. In the meantime, the frustrated community is working on a fork, which currently still bears the provisional name CoMaps.
Clarification: In fact, none of the three stakeholders of Organic Maps is directly part of the CoMaps initiative (as stated in the German version of this article), which has been advised in the comments (see below):
Hi, thank you for the kind article! One correction: there are no Organic Maps stakeholders/shareholders involved in CoMaps. Roman, Alexander, and Viktor have not had any input in CoMaps's formation. The most senior Organic Maps developer on the CoMaps team is PastK, who is only a volunteer and not a shareholder.
Greed is also not uncommon in open source circles and often leads to a project getting lost in a semi-proprietary dead end because the non-profit philosophy has been lost along the way and replaced by a for-profit philosophy. This appears to be exactly what has now happened to the Organic Maps project. The MIT licence was secretly cancelled at the end of last year and replaced by the personal copyright of one of the stakeholders.
commit 30e9911d4c8329068aca82fd6c0d896380ba99de
Author: Alexander Borsuk <170263+biodranik@users.noreply.github.com>
Date: Sat Nov 23 21:33:36 2024 +0100
Update LICENSE
No MIT yet, sorry.
Signed-off-by: Alexander Borsuk <170263+biodranik@users.noreply.github.com>
In addition, the Cloudflare CDN logs were apparently also activated in violation of the privacy policy in order to detect and prevent misuse of the metaserver, which undermines the privacy of users:
commit a6ff0eb05abfc891e6a3a32faa3cd307a40c6121
Author: Alexander Borsuk <170263+biodranik@users.noreply.github.com>
Date: Sun Nov 24 21:28:02 2024 +0100
Observe server abusers when needed
Signed-off-by: Alexander Borsuk <170263+biodranik@users.noreply.github.com>
diff --git a/wrangler.toml b/wrangler.toml
index bfcdcf6..bad7b47 100644
--- a/wrangler.toml
+++ b/wrangler.toml
@@ -23,3 +23,6 @@ route = 'meta.omaps.app/*'
[env.prod.vars]
DEBUG = false
+
+[observability.logs]
+enabled = true
Actions Taken
- I am making the code from before November 23, 2024, publicly available again under MIT. As one of the authors who contributed to the code while it was under the MIT license, I have the full right to take this action. Proprietary changes after "No MIT yet, sorry" and "Observe server abusers when needed" has been removed or reverted.
- The copyright notice has been updated to include "Copyright 2024 Organic Maps Contributors" to accurately reflect the current situation.
- Contributors and the community are invited to perform a thorough and independent review to verify that the code functions as expected without introducing any undocumented functionality.
- This post issues an open call to replace the proprietary Cloudflare technology with an open-source alternative, though this may take some time.
- Log collection has been disabled, as it was previously.
I, personally, apologize to the community for this matter. All necessary measures have been taken to resolve this issue. Organic Maps remains fully committed to privacy, transparency, and open-source values, which is why we are openly disclosing this issue.
Regards,
Roman.
https://github.com/orgs/organicmaps/discussions/9837
Clear the stage for CoMaps
To counter the recent proprietarisation of Organic Maps, a fork with the provisional name CoMaps was created, the source code of which is available on Codeberg. The source code of the metaserver, which was previously kept under lock and key, can be found on Github. This provides the nearest CDN server, which holds the requested map data so that a sufficiently fast connection for navigation can be guaranteed at all times.
The name CoMaps is only provisional until the vote on the final name of the fork has been completed. CoMaps is currently ahead of LibreMaps and voting on Codeberg will continue until 20 May 2025, so it will be interesting to see what happens.
Quo vadis, Organic Maps?
The incidents remind insiders of the drama surrounding Maps.me, which also openly started but ended up proprietary and became the basis of Organic Maps in the form of the last free version available after the source code was made proprietary.
It currently appears that the differences between the stakeholders of Organic Maps cannot be bridged. It is therefore advisable to have the reincarnation (presumably) called CoMaps on the radar. The Mastodon account of CoMaps would be a good choice in this regard.
📢 s3n🧩net says: Life situations and objectives change, that is unavoidable. It is therefore essential for open source projects to build on a clever governance model from the outset that effectively prevents proprietary approaches from parts of the developer community, as is now the case with CoMaps.
s3n🧩net wishes great fun with CoMaps
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