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Comment by throw738384 | Hacker News Reader

I would add a few points:

* Organic Maps devs are from Belarus, company is registered in Estonia. This is very difficult setup already, and I can imagine authors just want simplest setup possible. Perhaps they do not want to waste energy on nonprofit that is very very difficult and expensive to do internationally!

* If they sell the company so what? Create another fork and move on. It is opensource, but that does not mean authors can not get some money!

* Biggest expense for Organic Maps is hosting and mirroring map data. Is this fork going to use (and pay) their own servers?

* Is there list of developers and contributors behind this fork? I only found "us" and "we" and "community"!

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The thing is that there is an ongoing conflict between owners of Organic Maps OU itself. Due to ownership structure this leads to block of development etc for a long time already, so some existing contributors (that are not a part of OM OU business entity) started a fork.

Hi biodranik! Hope you're well.

> If they sell the company so what? Create another fork and move on. It is opensource, but that does not mean authors can not get some money!

Sure, but I think this is what's happening now. Not because they are selling the company, but apparently one issue is that nobody in the community knows where the donations are going.

They (CoMaps) complain about transparency regarding finances. I believe this would be a good reason to fork.

Donations are going to Organic Maps company. They have 10+ years of history. Most likely to pay for map server traffic.

Non-profit does not guarantee transparency, look at Mozilla as an example.

This fork is just a bunch of anonymous dudes on internet, who setup PayPal and replaced donate button. Until they do map data hosting, there is not much credibility!

Edit: there are 3th party mirrors for manual download, so I guess they can use those.

Sure, that's all fine.

What I am saying is that CoMaps seem to believe that Organic-Maps-the-Company is not transparent about what they do with the donations. They have a bunch of other reasons, but this is the one that I can understand.

I can understand that they don't want to donate money to Organic-Maps-the-Company if it then uses it to write proprietary code and later sell it. Not that they necessarily do that, but that's apparently a criticism from the CoMaps dudes.

Also with mobile apps, app store users are the most "valuable" thing -- much like Maps.Me, the "app" could be sold tomorrow and what really happens is the FOSS code is thrown away or sunsetted and the users wake up to an update where their map app is now a crypto scam, or whatever. The source code can be forked, but Organic Maps "owns" millions of app store users, and can "sell" that, in a way that violates users' trust. Us volunteer developers are very against that, but unable to stop it besides protesting.

Happened with Firefox. Mozilla now has unlimited rights to use and publish, anything you see, type or upload in Firefox. And it is still marketed as "privacy" friendly. Even Micro$ft has better license in their browser!

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