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by pastk 23 days ago
> you intentionally leaked the map generation code (which was not intended to be published)

In short:

It was perfectly legal to publish this code (Apache 2.0 repo and DCO signed agreeing its a public contribution) and OM shareholders have always claimed that the map generator code is open and people are free to fork it.

However it turned out they were holding back a bunch of commits to prevent people from easily forking the project while maintaining still that the commits are FOSS and will be eventually pushed to the main repo, its just they're "experimental" still (but in fact they had been used in prod for a few years already).

We made an agreement to fix this discrepancy and push the commits to the public repo, so that we can honestly state that Organic Maps is truly an open source project with no tricks and reservations. This has happened several months before the conflict between the shareholders and community contributors.

And indeed a good part of the commits had been pushed public during next months. And when I published the rest of the commits OM shareholders knew about it of course and again they didn't say anything against it.

However after about a month (after negotiations to improve OM governance has failed and ex-contributors, me included, have started CoMaps) they have started accusing me of "stealing" those commits.

If you're interested in more details then please refer to https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/organic-maps-open-lett...

1 comments

Also me and other CoMaps contributors had been actually banned several months later after they've started their accusations, so the ban is not directly because of the accusations.

At first we've been having discussion and arguing about the matter and related topics in OM chats. But people saw their very shaky arguments and how they refute their own previous words about openness of the maps generator etc.

So then they started just deleting such discussions and eventually banning CoMaps contributors.

And nowadays they censor all mentions of CoMaps in their chats and SMs and often ban users who dared to mention us.

Petty bureaucrats misusing their privileges to ban key contributors from FOSS projects is a recurring tale I'm afraid. I've seen this happen with Thunderbird, and later also with LibreOffice (well, The Document Foundation to be exact). It is ridiculous and frustrating, especially since most other contributors and users remain passive and let these things just happen (even when they don't agree), typically because they don't want to put in the effort, or to risk their cordial relations with those in power. I very much sympathize with your predicament.