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?
Some facts: Alexander Borsuk, Roman Tsisyk and Viktor Havaka are co-founders of Organic Maps which is a fork of Maps.Me. Alexander and Viktor were co-founders of Maps.Me as well. All of them are not working for Maps.Me anymore and Organic Maps (OM) is independent project since its inception.
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..)
>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'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.
Another example of a pushover license failing the purpose a developer wants it to serve. Should have used some copyleft license, that mandates sharing of modifications. The one that comes to mind is of course AGPL, which would have avoided the whole scenario of it being closed and hidden in the first place. Maybe someone will learn a lesson now.
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.
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.
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".
It looks like that code was never actually MIT licenced but had the licence-file in there by mistake. Then Roman made the repo public after the faulty licence got removed, because he (wrongly) believed the code actually was MIT-licenced before the change.
That's how I read it. Is it true? No idea but it might be.
If the code is in a repo that has been shared with other people and with a license file saying "All code in this repo is under MIT license", then the code is MIT licensed.
You can't come along later and say "I changed my mind" or "I made a mistake". Hard luck, be more careful next time.
The only exception would be if you ask the people whom it was shared with if they're ok with retroactively changing the license.
The MIT license was added by Alexander himself in the initial commit in June 2021. Since then Roman has contributed actively to the code and Viktor started to contribute more recently too.
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.
Indeed. It should be the default to have a full map of your area downloaded. But no, Google wants everyone to be dependent upon them on a second-to-second level. (Yes I know Google has offline maps and unlike YouTube the offline support is free as in beer, but it’s in an untransparent and a much less powerful manner, and if you’re online it will use the network heavily)
I was in a chunk of the world where roaming was prohibitive this summer, and Organic Maps took us everywhere, found us incredible viewing spots to photograph from, and basically gave us a real connection to the landscape around us. The UI was slightly confusing, but forgivable, and if I had any money I would give it to them.
And it is accurate in the Caribbean, unlike Google Maps that insists on sending me over cliffs to my death, people’s back yards, non existent or dead end roads, as well as other areas best avoided.
You have OpenStreetMap to thank for that. It is a Wikipedia-like crowd sourced map that anybody can contribute to. The immense majority of navigation apps use OpenStreetMap data, including Strava, RWGPS, OsmAnd, and OrganicMaps.
Ugh, maps.me. That used to be the nice free OSM map viewer until the company went in a sleazy direction. And, among other things, creating a cryptocurrency token. Because that's what you want in your free community map viewer.
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?
Sounds like there was just some miscommunication, and as far as I see, the "added logs" were to detect CDN abuse, so nothing shady so far. Still, would be great to see contributors aligned :)
There's two opposing perspectives to consider here:
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.
The Cloudflare Worker in question sounds darn trivial, just redirecting to a regional server. In fact, Cloudflare or Fly.io would probably do this with just their built-in DNS, automatically.
Even if the repository was closed to the world, it was open to some individuals.
Some individuals got the work under the MIT license that allows them to do whatever they want, including opening it to the world.
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.
I’ve used this app as an offline maps tool for travel for a long time, when I got it I thought it was just a fine OSM client.
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?
Not exactly sure what you mean. My understanding is Maps.me started trying to extract value from users (via the mentioned means) and that Organic Maps [0], took an old open-licensed fork of maps.me from before Maps.me went bad.
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.
Something odd about this story is looking at Alexander's Github activity history. He started being active on Github in March 2021 - around the start of this project - & since then has been extremely consistently very active right up to September 2024, when his activity dropped off severely, a month or two before he made this license change.
I use both and they're both great, but also not drop-ins for each other. OSMand has more features, but is way more confusing and quite a bit slower. So I have OrganicMaps cover my basic navigation needs, but if e.g. I want to access offline Wikivoyage travel guides, I use OSMand.
Still a wonderful and stable solution. It has some killer features as well: unlike OM, it let's you route anything. In OM good luck routing without proper GPS fix (from a parking, etc), in Osmand you can do pretty much anything.
It's insane how feature rich Osmand is, up to a point where it became a bit too complex for some.
Do I have this right?
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?
Some facts: Alexander Borsuk, Roman Tsisyk and Viktor Havaka are co-founders of Organic Maps which is a fork of Maps.Me. Alexander and Viktor were co-founders of Maps.Me as well. All of them are not working for Maps.Me anymore and Organic Maps (OM) is independent project since its inception.
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..)
>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'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.
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Another example of a pushover license failing the purpose a developer wants it to serve. Should have used some copyleft license, that mandates sharing of modifications. The one that comes to mind is of course AGPL, which would have avoided the whole scenario of it being closed and hidden in the first place. Maybe someone will learn a lesson now.
No, you got it wrong.
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.
Removing the MIT license from the repository and claiming it as 'my code' is not how open source works.
4 replies →
As you seem to be Alexander Borsuk...
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.
How come the server code was (is?) de-facto closed source and this fact was kept hidden?
In a project that claims to be open-source, privacy-focused and community-driven.
"from the organization"? which organization?
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.
They founded MapsWithMe, then they sold it to mail.ru who renamed it maps.me, then open-sourced and eventually sold it to someone else.
> has now been booted from the organization
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".
It looks like that code was never actually MIT licenced but had the licence-file in there by mistake. Then Roman made the repo public after the faulty licence got removed, because he (wrongly) believed the code actually was MIT-licenced before the change.
That's how I read it. Is it true? No idea but it might be.
If the code is in a repo that has been shared with other people and with a license file saying "All code in this repo is under MIT license", then the code is MIT licensed. You can't come along later and say "I changed my mind" or "I made a mistake". Hard luck, be more careful next time.
The only exception would be if you ask the people whom it was shared with if they're ok with retroactively changing the license.
1 reply →
The MIT license was added by Alexander himself in the initial commit in June 2021. Since then Roman has contributed actively to the code and Viktor started to contribute more recently too.
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.
I don't understand this at all. Can someone explain how/why this conflict is happening within organic maps?
> Roman noticed this. He undid the changes, made this post, and has now been booted from the organization?
Correct.
That's my understanding as well.
Definitely will follow this, I was really disappointed when Maps.Me started getting enshittified. Hope it doesn't happen to Organic Maps as well.
Opportunity to give Organic Maps a shout for being brilliant and wonderful.
Indeed. It should be the default to have a full map of your area downloaded. But no, Google wants everyone to be dependent upon them on a second-to-second level. (Yes I know Google has offline maps and unlike YouTube the offline support is free as in beer, but it’s in an untransparent and a much less powerful manner, and if you’re online it will use the network heavily)
I was in a chunk of the world where roaming was prohibitive this summer, and Organic Maps took us everywhere, found us incredible viewing spots to photograph from, and basically gave us a real connection to the landscape around us. The UI was slightly confusing, but forgivable, and if I had any money I would give it to them.
12 replies →
And it is accurate in the Caribbean, unlike Google Maps that insists on sending me over cliffs to my death, people’s back yards, non existent or dead end roads, as well as other areas best avoided.
You have OpenStreetMap to thank for that. It is a Wikipedia-like crowd sourced map that anybody can contribute to. The immense majority of navigation apps use OpenStreetMap data, including Strava, RWGPS, OsmAnd, and OrganicMaps.
Ugh, maps.me. That used to be the nice free OSM map viewer until the company went in a sleazy direction. And, among other things, creating a cryptocurrency token. Because that's what you want in your free community map viewer.
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?
Sounds like there was just some miscommunication, and as far as I see, the "added logs" were to detect CDN abuse, so nothing shady so far. Still, would be great to see contributors aligned :)
I haven't noticed any great deterioration in maps.me
But then also... I want to try Organic Maps more, but how do I feed it all my user-supplied info from maps.me ?
You can export your bookmarks as KML files and import them into OM.
There's two opposing perspectives to consider here:
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.
The Cloudflare Worker in question sounds darn trivial, just redirecting to a regional server. In fact, Cloudflare or Fly.io would probably do this with just their built-in DNS, automatically.
This is not a fork of Organic Maps.
Makes it all sound very petty.
Even if the repository was closed to the world, it was open to some individuals. Some individuals got the work under the MIT license that allows them to do whatever they want, including opening it to the world.
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.
Isn't the title wrong?
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.
I’ve used this app as an offline maps tool for travel for a long time, when I got it I thought it was just a fine OSM client.
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?
Not exactly sure what you mean. My understanding is Maps.me started trying to extract value from users (via the mentioned means) and that Organic Maps [0], took an old open-licensed fork of maps.me from before Maps.me went bad.
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/
By “this app” I assume you’re referring to Maps.me.
I can recommend Organic Maps. It has none of those crypto shenanigans and is a great offline OSM-based app.
Yes maps.me
Something odd about this story is looking at Alexander's Github activity history. He started being active on Github in March 2021 - around the start of this project - & since then has been extremely consistently very active right up to September 2024, when his activity dropped off severely, a month or two before he made this license change.
osmand is better anyway :>
I use OsmAnd, but perusing both of the repos it is apparent that OrganicMaps has better code.
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.
I use both and they're both great, but also not drop-ins for each other. OSMand has more features, but is way more confusing and quite a bit slower. So I have OrganicMaps cover my basic navigation needs, but if e.g. I want to access offline Wikivoyage travel guides, I use OSMand.
Still a wonderful and stable solution. It has some killer features as well: unlike OM, it let's you route anything. In OM good luck routing without proper GPS fix (from a parking, etc), in Osmand you can do pretty much anything.
It's insane how feature rich Osmand is, up to a point where it became a bit too complex for some.
This item title seems to be editorialising.
downloading from fdroid as I type this how did I not know? awsome what contreversy can do! exactly the oposite thanks
****, i use organic maps, we need to get more eyes on this.
Organic Maps is great