Comment by milliams

2 years ago

I believe that it was always open-source.

I remember them promising to open-source it early on and then waiting at least a few months for the code. At the time I was jaded and thought they'd go back on the promise, but I'm grateful they didn't. It's the most polished FLOSS map app.

It wasn't always. It started as MapsWithMe by a swiss company, which gave it away for free with a pro version (for which I paid), then mail.ru took it over and made it opensource (while all my build attempts failed) and then a new owner later added tons of ads and stuff into it and made it closed. Then some people forked the slightly older open source version.

  • Those people are the original founders who took it open source, which was a great move since otherwise it'd have become just another piece of shovelware getting enshittified into oblivion.