Maps.me co-founder tries to close down Organic Maps open-source fork
github.com
github.com
Organic Maps had a private (but MIT-licensed) Cloudflare Worker in a repo called meta. Alexander Borsuk (an Organic Maps maintainer, and co-founder of maps.me) surreptitiously removed the license and added logging to the worker.
Roman Tsisyk, another maintainer of Organic Maps, noticed this. He undid the changes, made this post, and has now been booted from the organization?
Definitely will follow this, I was really disappointed when Maps.Me started getting enshittified. Hope it doesn't happen to Organic Maps as well.
The https://github.com/organicmaps/meta 404s for me now. I still see Roman listed as a member of organicmaps: https://github.com/orgs/organicmaps/people
I guess he was in both maps.me and organic maps? Which seems odd.. I thought these were completely separate organizations with different priorities and goals. That seems odd they would have leaders contributing in both products.
To clarify, Roman claims that he has had some permissions revoked from the Organic Maps organization on Github in response to this. Alexander Borsuk stated that he "will return access if we solve the problem of Roma making decisions alone".
Now, the current situation: OM's map server (CF worker) albeit under MIT license was de-facto closed source all this time. Roman opened the repo for public access. Alexander revoked Roman's GH permissions and closed the repo again.
(I've been actively contributing to OM for 3 years and I thought that all parts are open source. Until very recently..)
I'm not sure if there is some distinction between software and map-data entailed in the discussion of this "server", "software repo", etc. but assuming it's all one thing:
if the content in question was MIT-licensed as specifed by the license in the repo, any one of the members of the project with access to the material would be within their rights to make copies public. There is no de-facto closed source wrt open licenses.
If no one is publishing a copy of something with an open license, then that is the definition of de-facto closed.
de-facto means what is the reality vs what is the theory.
In theory you can get a copy because it has a license that says so.
In reality you can not get a copy because you are not one of the people with physical access to some existing copy.
It is de-facto closed while that set of facts is true.
There are these books that explain the meanings of terms. We don't have to guess and have random individual ideas about what words mean, and then wonder why no one can communicate.
Yes, and "in-facto" is not the same as "de-facto".
De-facto means "describes practices that exist in reality, regardless of whether they are officially recognized by laws or other formal norms". It is not a precise term.
I have some code on my server that I wrote with an MIT license. You have no way of accessing my server, and the code has not been made available elsewhere. You can't even know that the code exists, much less that it has an MIT license. To you, it is for practical purposes the same as closed-source software, in the sense that you cannot obtain the source code of the software, despite it having an open source license. This is an applicable situation for "de facto" by its common meaning.
"Open source" is not even a precisely defined term, although people who are persnickety about the definition refer to the OSI definition, which includes "Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code". By this definition, code with the MIT license held secretly in a private repo is not open source. It became open source when Roman made it public, as was his right to do by the license. The license is one component of what makes software open source, but there are other components as well.
And then Roman made the repo public, effectively distributing the licence to people and thus making it open source, without coordinating with the other contributors?
I don't see any replies by Alexandr, but it feels like this could have easily been resolved with a less antagonistic response by Roman - but of course, I don't know what other history they have.
* I guess technically, it was given to the other contributors with access to the private repo - i.e. Roman did have the legal right to distribute it further under the MIT licence. Presumably, the original contributor (Alexandr) just applied that licence by mistake.
So there are people who contributed the code under the MIT license, so its not a sole work of Alexander and the license was not added as a mistake.
IMO from a legal standpoint Roman is absolutely in his right to redistribute the code.
Roman supported the private repo and was aware of the temporary (last 3 days only) CF logs to address CDN abuse. However, several hours ago, he (or someone else using his account?) unexpectedly made the repository public without discussing it with the project's maintainers. As a result, his account rights were temporarily restricted to clarify the situation.
There is still no response from Roman regarding his motivation for ignoring the usual governing board rules. Previously, all similar important project decisions were always discussed with maintainers/active contributors before being executed.
I hope that we resolve this strange situation successfully soon.
Why the removal of the MIT license?
Was that decision put to a vote like "all important project decisions" are? I assume it can't have been unless Roman is blatantly lying about only noticing it a few days later.
Of course at that point they should have realised that they weren't the only author of the code any more and that Roman understandably would have the wrong idea. But I see how it's an easy mistake to make, and it would probably also have easily been resolved had Roman reached out about it, rather than just instantly making it public and implying nefarious behaviour ("quietly made a change...discovered by me").
In a project that claims to be open-source, privacy-focused and community-driven.
That's how I read it. Is it true? No idea but it might be.
The only exception would be if you ask the people whom it was shared with if they're ok with retroactively changing the license.
So there are people who contributed the code under the MIT license, so its not a sole work of Alexander and the license was not added as a mistake.
Correct.
Curious to hear more about this? Something specific to Organic Maps? I spend a lot of time studying maps when I'm on a trip for this purpose.
So now Organic Maps is the nice free OSM map viewer. I can't tell from the rest of the discussion: is still OK? Or has it been corrupted somehow?
But then also... I want to try Organic Maps more, but how do I feed it all my user-supplied info from maps.me ?
1. We don't know the details of the internal politics between the approved maintainers of this private repo, but, licenses aside if someone decided to make a private repo I created public without consulting me I would be pissed. I would consider that at best rude & at worst misconduct.
2. It seems evident that the original creator of this repo was extracting labour from other volunteers(?) under the facade of it being an open source project. Attempting to undo that retroactively is drifting toward fraud & at best heavily outweighs the severity of anything in (1) above.
Really hope OrganicMaps survives this, absolutely beautiful, invaluable app.
This is not a fork of Organic Maps.
Makes it all sound very petty.
What is not right is that once it was MIT with contribution from multiple authors, it is theoretically not possible (even for the original author) to change the license to something else than MIT without the agreement of the other authors.
Things would have been different if it was the private repo of a company only used by employees of this company, and having contributors bound by a special contract like a NDA.
What I understand is that the fork is about a Cloudflare Worker used to connect the user to the closest DNS. The title IMO suggests the fork is about Organic Maps itself.
Then years later I hear it was running crypto nonsense (what) and was involved in FTX (what), but out of laziness I’m still using the thing because it can’t do any upsells when I am offline anyways.
Any recommendations for a good iOS offline map app that’s just a map app?
I currently use organicmaps.app as a nice offline back up for my traveling. I don't know how this current drama impacts organicmaps. I didn't realize that maps.me was also a contributor to organicmaps.
[0] - https://organicmaps.app/
I can recommend Organic Maps. It has none of those crypto shenanigans and is a great offline OSM-based app.
What I like best about OSMAnd is that you can tweak the routing algorithm without recompiling the code, as the rules are stored in routing.xml.
It's insane how feature rich Osmand is, up to a point where it became a bit too complex for some.