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Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

The concern seems to be they want a bunch of guarantees about what will be done with the project - not because there is a change happening from Organic, but because they're afraid of a change happening in the future. If such a change happens in the future, they can fork then. I mean, hell, this already happened; they had Maps.ME, it was sold, Roman forked it to Organic. If it gets sold again they can fork again. This seems like it'll hurt the community more than if they'd waited until it was necessary.

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I think that the open source community is too quick to make "just fork it later" the answer to all our governance woes.

Look at the state of WordPress: the (B?)DFL actively bans people from the community for critiquing his self-described "nuclear war" waged against his biggest competitor in the hosting space, which "nuclear war" has caught thousands of members of the community in the crossfire. And yet we see no fork. Why? Because forking is hard and fragments the community, so people would rather put up with a tyrant than deal with the risk of instability. This is no different than tyrants in any other environment.

If a project has good governance established from the beginning, including a reasonably democratic process for contributors to elect the executive function, then the community can be reasonably sure that they won't feel the need to fork in the future because they have recourse if things go sour.

Forkability is an underused metric when evaluating an open source tool.

If I understand correctly, there is work going in inside the WordPress community. Not sure if and when things will happen, I am not involved personally.

A difference between Wordpress and Organic Maps, though, is that Wordpress is a framework whereas Organic Maps is an application. Switching to a fork of Wordpress means a different extension marketplace, various config files that may need to be changed, etc. Switching to a fork of Organic Maps is just downloading a different app that does the same thing.

Completely irrespective of the governance structure of Organic Maps, by its nature it is much more easily forkable than something like Wordpress.

There needs to be a server generating up to date map files. Which isn't complicated in comparison, but it's a decent bit of resources.

> Apes Together Strong

Absolutely 100% agree with your statement, Linux desktop is the perfect example of that. You get a billion different distribution that all comes from debian, arch and maybe fedora but that's all.

In my opinion, there should be 3 Linux distribution. That's all.

For instance Ubuntu: Yeah Ubuntu gnome suck, yeah canonical push snap package when flappack are better but do you really need a new distribution because of that ?

Perfection is the enemy of progress. And when things go all bad and you have used all other alternative, then and only then forking should be considered. Like a nuclear button.

Currently i feel like it's more often used by newcomer that want to get to the lead position of a project they are passionate about but didn't start, so they fork and get a fraction of the community behind. It's not much but it's still a bit.

Un(?)fortunately, us Organic Maps forkers have been with the project since Organic Maps was OMaps, and before. The only people with more commits than the senior fork member are the OM co-owners themselves. We really tried getting OM to deliver on their promises, but it seems silence is preferable to accountability for them.

>In my opinion, there should be 3 Linux distribution. That's all.

Initially I instinctively agreed with you - certainly there's too many fragmentation in the Linux distro space!

Then I recalled I use NixOs, and it probably didn't make it to your top 3...

Couldn't nixos main feature be implemented in a mainstream distribution ?

Technically you can install nix package manager on Debian, and what is nixos main interest without it's package manager ?

It manages the entire, immutable, OS with it. That's a completely different paradigm, you cannot simply mix them!

> yeah canonical push snap package when flappack are better but do you really need a new distribution because of that ?

In practice yes, since Canonical is replacing essential system components to depend on snap. So you can't just "not use it", you're forced to be dependent on their upstream package hosting service that you can't rehost yourself.

> If such a change happens in the future, they can fork then...

Did such a change not already happen with the addition of Kayak affiliate links without any community consultation? It seems to me that there has already been enough to justify a fork.

Not to mention, there was a promise of electing and changing boardmembers which has never happened, and hiding the use of OrganicMaps project donations for personal vacations as alleged by the initial open letter.

> hiding the use of OrganicMaps project donations for personal vacations as alleged by the initial open letter

Were those donations intended to support the core developers generally? Or were they specifically intended to pay for servers, equipment, etc.?

If it’s the former, a vacation seems like a totally legitimate use. If the latter, not so much.

> If it’s the former, a vacation seems like a totally legitimate use

Imo hiding that the funds were used even in a legitimate case makes it improper. If it was intended to be paid as a salary then they should have disclosed that $x were paid out as a salary. As I understand it, the only reason we know that the funds left the project was because one of the founders revealed the use of funds by the other founders, not through a planned, transparent, or regular process. In other words, the revelation that funds were being used seemed to be an anomaly as opposed to a regular practice.

The original open letter states essentially as much: "It's fine for developers to be reimbursed for their hard work, but it should be done in a fair, transparent and accountable way."

> not because there is a change happening from Organic

They mention financial transparency. I don't know the details, but "we want to know what our donations are used for" is a reasonable request to have, I would say.

There seems to be a bit of drama about part of the server software being closed source: https://github.com/orgs/organicmaps/discussions/9837

So, I guess that’s a pretty awesome business plan. Establish some open source entity, let the community develop everything for you, sell the entity, then fork it, let the community develop everything for you, sell again, then fork it, let the community …

Isn't that a valid worry? Especially in a project that needs user contribution the eventual horizon does matter.

Would you shovel dirt in a community garden project if you know the guy on top will eventually turn it into a commercial business? That means your work wasn't going towards a nice community garden as you thought, but it was going towards one guy being too stingy to actually pay labour. Sure maybe that guy didn't know he would do that from the beginning, but what difference would it make?

Governance does matter.

this appears to be an offshoot of the hidden MIT code snafu from a bit back

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