[ihatehn]

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.

[neilv]

Good point. I wonder whether it would be good for forks to come with a page that makes a case for the legitimacy of the fork and who will be controlling it and/or setting the founding rules for the governance. With links back to supporting raw evidence in repos and forums, so people can verify.

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.)

[will-bradley]

Most of the top 16 signers of the open letter are well-known names in Organic Maps, and the Updates to the letter try to fairly characterize the (lack of) response from OM. It's hard to link directly to raw evidence for the general public to review, since the most concerning topics (what will owners do in the future, what have they done with donation money) were in chat rooms that don't have public links and are exactly what the letter is asking for OM "owners" to provide. https://openletter.earth/open-letter-to-organic-maps-shareho...

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!

[neilv]

I don't know why your comment was dead, so I vouched and upvoted it.

Thanks for those helpful comments about this particular fork. It's a good example for a question about best practices for our field.