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by random3 26 days ago
Relevant thread from yesterday's thread on the original project this was forked from

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48794575

https://itsfoss.com/news/organic-maps-fork-comaps/

> 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.

2 comments

To clarify - this quote pertains to the Organic Maps situation

> 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.

CoMaps had been started because Organic Maps shareholders were not interested fixing those governance and transparency issues.

Nitpick: Organic Map is not original project. It's a fork of Maps.me.
Another nitpick: at least OM is made by people who made MapsMe. CoMaps is not - developed by a community, whatever it means.
You can look up who the contributors are, e.g. in their open-source repo: https://codeberg.org/comaps There are also issues and projects with lots of discussions about what to prioritize, etc. So, bashing that “community” is too fuzzy is perhaps not very warranted. (Although I guess they should add a section “Who makes CoMaps?” to the FAQs or so.)
The fact that OM leadership pulled the same open-closed game twice is telling. Many open source contributors who donated their private time and effort to the project just didn't want to do that any more when OM leadership started the game again.

That's the main reason they forked and started a new project.

Also forked for similar governance concerns :))
Interesting, I didn't realize Maps.me used to be open-source! I suppose this is the code (from five years ago): https://github.com/mapsme/omim