Organic Maps Forked Over Governance Concerns: CoMaps is Born

a year ago by Otter to c/opensource

An Organic Maps fork has emerged due to broken trust.

sem 212 points a year ago

You might know of Organic Maps, the open source app that's an alternative to Google Maps. Recently, concerns have been raised about its governance, with many contributors questioning the project's transparency and direction.

Despite being advertised as a community-driven project, key decisions, including financial management, partnerships (with Kayak, for instance), and the inclusion of proprietary components in the code were made by a small group of shareholders, often without input from the broader contributor community.

These shareholders have reportedly used the project’s donation funds for personal expenses, like holiday trips, raising serious concerns about financial transparency.

As a result, many contributors teamed up and forked the project, establishing CoMaps, a new alternative focused on openness and being not-for-profit.

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joeldebruijn 88 points a year ago

project’s donation funds for personal expenses, like holiday trips

I do have the same overall concerns though and for me enough reason to switch the moment its possible also. But I tend to see the 'the holiday trips' as a symtpom instead of a problem. Later on they explained that some developers received 3 months salary worth of pay over the course of 4 years. Putting a lot more time in it during those four years. If I contributed that much for free I also would spend it on a holiday. But the problem is like you said transparancy:

No openness of financial transactions which I guess showing salary wouldnt be a problem and if everybody was able to see the salary was reasonable. (and I dont care what people do with it in their private live).
Maybe they didnt organise it that way (paying oneself for labour and tell everyone) but maybe they used it directly for holidays etc, which is a problem for the business entity they have I guess. Like my boss paying my holiday instead of my salary.
Reluctant to answer questions in reasonable timeframes (couple of months)

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Creat 20 points a year ago

Switching is possible now, if you want. CoMaps builds have been released for a while, and are in f-droid I think since today? I have no idea about Google play store.

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makingStuffForFun 10 points a year ago

I can't find it on fdroid.

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ProdigalFrog 23 points a year ago

I had to go to the F-droid setting, click on Include Anti-Features, then enable 'Tethered Network Services' for it to show up in the F-droid search.

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Creat 2 points a year ago

I just saw this post but didn't look any further into it than reading the title.

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joeldebruijn 2 points a year ago

Smartphone from employer doesnt permit sideloading. ;)

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joeldebruijn 2 points a year ago

Yeah! https://play.google.com/...

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ComradeMiao -11 points a year ago

Is this ai?

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enemenemu 20 points a year ago

This is patrick

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warmaster 5 points a year ago

Swayze, Stewart or from Bikini Bottom?

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M137 1 point a year ago

It's the text from the article... How are you this dumb?

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buttnugget 8 points a year ago

It’s not stupidity. They didn’t read the article then came to the comments and saw a strangely worded response.

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ComradeMiao 2 points a year ago

Yeah, just read like ai

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dRLY 54 points a year ago

Good to see devs willing to do the work needed in order to draw hard lines on the capitalist leeches that divert money away from the project. I am looking forward to the traffic system that they mentioned as a future option. Would allow users that are okay with turning on those features for adding crowdsourced traffic data and stuff like marking cops posting up to get their quotas.

Literally the only thing that keeps me on Waze is that stuff. I have to deal with a lot of interstate travel to and from work and knowing that a big crash happened so I can re-route before getting stuck is crucial. I will still make sure to have this installed just like I had Organic Maps as a good option. And to see what stuff I go to that needs to be updated on OSM and StreetComplete. Had to add all of the addresses on my street on OSM a while ago just to be able to correctly enter my address. One of those addresses that is listed as one town for mailing and is technically within the borders of a smaller one with regards to utilities and plots of land.

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Debs 5 points a year ago

The traffic system would be amazing. This is what is stopping me from using this.

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Auli 3 points a year ago

The problem is if nobody uses it, there won't be any data.

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dRLY 1 point a year ago

True, but if the option to start using it isn't there. Then it also won't have data to even get started. I remember when I first started using Waze back on my Galaxy S3, it wasn't super helpful (for both the traffic and in some cases the map data). This was mostly due to it not being used by many people in my state at the time (the friend that told me about it used it in a much larger city with more "tech" people around). So even if it doesn't help me directly right away, I am more than happy to start using it daily to report what I can.

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rocci -11 points a year ago

Magic Earth is open source and has traffic/crowd sourced stuff like Waze

Edit: Sorry guys, I don't know why I thought Magic Earth was open source. Really looking forward to this if they get traffic data in there!

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memphis 40 points a year ago

The actual app Magic Earth is proprietary, but it uses OpenStreetMap

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Dreaming_Novaling 8 points a year ago

Fucking RIP, someone on Lemmy recommended it to me and I thought it was open source. Should've known that Organic Maps would've also did traffic data if it was truly open source...

For now, I'll still use it cause it's better than being tracked by Waze/Google, but damn... Hope these new maps are good.

Edit: Downloaded Comaps from Fdroid yesterday but it wouldn't download the maps, and I can't get into the app. Gave all permissions, wifi was on (but also tried on data), and turned on compatibility mode on Graphene. Downloaded today from the Codeberg repo and it still has an error downloading the maps. Anyone else experiencing this?

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Broken 2 points a year ago

Yeah, I'm in the same boat as you. But I've noticed my maps dont update any longer so I'm glad this is all coming together at the same time.

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warmaster 16 points a year ago

As closed source as it can get.

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dRLY 1 point a year ago

I haven't heard of that one. Will look into it just to have options.

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kaeurenne 49 points a year ago

These shareholders have reportedly used the project’s donation funds for personal expenses, like holiday trips, raising serious concerns about financial transparency.

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phoenixz 29 points a year ago

Anytime shareholders are involved you know it's going to be shit.

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defuse959 30 points a year ago

Quick heads up for anyone running verbose NextDNS configs, you'll need to add an exception for this entry currently to start the initial download

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JimVanDeventer 23 points a year ago

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buttnugget 15 points a year ago

This meme format makes me sad ever since I learned that the blonde woman was outed as being severely physically abused by her husband here.

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Forbo 16 points a year ago

Oof. That sucks.

Time to fork the meme.

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jol 3 points a year ago

The cat's her husband?

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whoisearth 3 points a year ago

Yes

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buttnugget -2 points a year ago

Nothing is as funny as having to undergo facial reconstruction surgery because your husband punched you hard enough to break your bones.

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jol -4 points a year ago

That's horrible :( hope the cat was put down for that

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sfjvvssss 1 point a year ago

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Hupf 3 points a year ago

Which rendering engine do you use?

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sfjvvssss 1 point a year ago

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Hupf 1 point a year ago

Shame, that could've been an easy fix. I remember back in the day on V1 performance was really abysmal.

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Suoko 21 points a year ago

I hope they will make the destination search much better, it's almost unusable now, and unintuitive. Regarding traffic data, how much could it be per user per year, something like this https://www.mapbox.com/traffic-data ?

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hansolo 10 points a year ago

Destination search in all the OSM based maps is a challenge. The Latin letter transliteration only applies to large features. So if I want to find an address in a country try that doesn't use Latin script, I literally need a keyboard in that language or do a lot of cut and paste from Google Translate. My address never, ever works on OSM. Gets the wrong street, can't even handle house/building numbers. Works fine on Google.

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Schlemmy 5 points a year ago

Magic Earth handles it decently.

https://www.magicearth.com/

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hansolo 3 points a year ago

Holy shit. Yes, it does. Thanks! Hadn't heard of it until today

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Schlemmy 4 points a year ago

Not FOSS though. But privacy first

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troglodyte_mignon 0 points a year ago

Honestly, that just seems normal to me. If you’re looking for an adress in a foreign language, it seems obvious that you’d have to type it in that language. I don’t really understand why people would expect their map to do it for them.

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hansolo 1 point a year ago

Because it's an option already. "Transliterate to Latin letters."

Edit: I should add that you should look at how many keyboard layouts there are. It's kind of silly that for me to use an OSM based map and go to any county east of Slovenia I need to both have the keyboard AND know the transliteration of the alphabet.

Have you seen the Armenian or Georgian alphabets? What makes the K sound?

Did you know every dialect of a Slavic language using Cyrillic has it's own distinct keyboard varied by mostly the letter for the nya sound and J?

Greek?

All while transliteration works fine in Google.

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iopq 2 points a year ago

East Slavic languages only differ by the choice of i/y letters and Belarusian's short u, Ukrainian yi and ye letters (and technically the apostrophe). You can have a combined Ukrainian and Russian alphabet keyboard. I have it on Heliboard

Bulgarian uses the er golyam/hard sign as a vowel, which it used to be in every Slavic language in the past. Macedonian is mutually intelligible, but uses an alphabet similar to BCS Cyrillic.

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dbkblk 3 points a year ago

Magic Earth search isn't that good neither. I use GMaps-WV to get the adress then, once clipped in memory, it opens MagicEarth automatically/

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swelter_spark 6 points a year ago

The only difficulty I find with Magic Earth is if you type in the address differently than it is in the system, it doesn't always find it. "Highway" vs "hwy", etc. But it's way better than OSM+, whose search is borderline unusable.

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dbkblk 3 points a year ago

Exactly, it isn't permissive (like OSM, as you said). There should be some natural language research here.

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warmaster 1 point a year ago

I bet it wouldn't be much.

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Suoko 3 points a year ago

I could switch to this app if it had live traffic data. Isn't there any shared traffic data to get some info from for free at least to begin with?

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warmaster 2 points a year ago

There's no FOSS app that does this unfortunately.

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Suoko 1 point a year ago

Just a collection of various ones https://github.com/...

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Schlemmy -2 points a year ago

Magic Earth has live traffic data.

https://www.magicearth.com/

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warmaster 4 points a year ago

Not FOSS though

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MonkderVierte 15 points a year ago

community-driven project […] shareholders

How does that work?

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MotoAsh 10 points a year ago

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lewdian69 15 points a year ago

What was the benefit of Organic Maps over OsmAnd or other options? I never understood why Organic Maps was getting so much traction.

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Interstellar_1 40 points a year ago

I prefer the simple interface of organic maps

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joeldebruijn 32 points a year ago

OM and for now CoMaps are faster and easier to learn. For most people. With OSMand configurations are endless and people tend to get lost in them. Also the map data of OM is highly filtered OSM data. Meaning smaller files and a faster app.

The downside is less features, but as always ... if you dont need the absent features ... its a plus.

Now whats interesting how they both will keep it that way. My theory is when they listen to EVERY wish from random users (with other persona and user stories) they eventually become like OSMand too.

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teolan 6 points a year ago

Organic maps (and now comaps) have a much better rendering engine. It's much faster, while also being much more legible. It's routing engine is also faster.

OsmAnd does have the upper hand when it wcomes to features though. I have both and use OsmaAnd when I need to export a route to GPX or see relief.

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sunstoned 3 points a year ago

For me its the android auto compatibility. OSM won't (and probably shouldnt) jump through the google hoops to do so. It's at least nice to have a more open option for an otherwise very proprietary ecosystem. Even though organic maps has room to improve

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pineapple -5 points a year ago

Organic maps has traffic, osmand doesn't. I feel osmand is better in pretty much every other situation but organic maps has traffic.

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Dave 23 points a year ago

My Organic Maps doesn't have traffic (or doesn't for my area). I can't see anything about it online either, except discussions about how it could be implemented.

Where do you find the traffic info? Even if zoomed in to New York I see nothing.

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apex 8 points a year ago

@pineapple @lewdian69 does it have traffic? Who provides that data?

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pineapple 2 points a year ago

Thanks for asking i've been wondering myself actually. I looked it up and organic maps doesn't actually do traffic, although magic earth does (another not foss but apparenty privacy respecting map app that uses osm) It says it's just crowdsourced from the general public who uses magic earth (in an anonimous way, I guess there are enough magic earth uses for it to work since Some people say it works really well. (although others say it doesn't you should probably try it for yourself.)

On another note that I also found from my research just then, traffic knowing apps don't actually improve travel times but they do make previously congested places more congested. sources:

Edit: Magic earth is not foss so there is no way to varify that the app is actually respecting your privacy like it says it is, i'm sorry for any confusion.

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antipiratgruppen 3 points a year ago

Magic Earth is proprietary, not FOSS.

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apex 1 point a year ago

@pineapple I use Waze and the traffic info are very very usefull, especially when there are closed road or accidents. I know, it's Waze and I'd love to be able to use OsmAnd (which I use for other purposes), but the traffic info that has Waze is the best so far (at least where I live)

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NutWrench 11 points a year ago

Will there be an alternative to StreetComplete? An Apps that lets you contribute to CoMaps instead of Organic Maps?

edit n/m. I found out that StreetComplete contributes to OpenStreetMaps.

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pyre 11 points a year ago

aaaand uninstalled

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joeldebruijn 9 points a year ago

https://codeberg.org/... For FAQ

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Mynameisallen 8 points a year ago

Installed, not seeing and noticeable difference to start but I'm glad someone took this up

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awaysaway 6 points a year ago

Where does this fall on the spectrum of Differences in Opinion - We're Evil Now?

just migrated to Organic Maps from maps.me and would prefer to not have to export and import and adapt to new UI again

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water 23 points a year ago

It's the same UI, and you can easily import your Organic Maps stuff.

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Mucki 6 points a year ago

Offtopic: Is it possible to "avoid road" upon tapping a location? OsmAnd offers this feature, in case you are confronted with a road block or construction site. CoMaps does not it seems. I can not correct routing live without this function.

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qweertz 1 point a year ago

Organic Maps and thus by extension CoMaps are supposed to be minimalist and light on features. They are kinda the polar opposite to OSMAnd (at least regarding that)

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alexdeathway 4 points a year ago

Should have named it libre map.

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quant 1 point a year ago

A little variety shouldn't hurt. There are plenty of Libre X or Yet Another X projects already.

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poinck 2 points a year ago

I could not find any word of an iOS version of CoMap. Does someone know?

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otter 5 points a year ago

Organic Maps was on iOS, my guess is that it'll take time to get a new app approved on the iOS store

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poinck 2 points a year ago

Then users can pick between MAPS.me, Organic Maps and CoMaps. Crazy!!

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