Comment by ikesau
1 year ago
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.
There is de-facto anything wrt anything. All it means is "as good as" or "might as well be" or "no different from" or "in effect" etc.
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.
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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.
It's sound like the person who removed the licence also originally wrote the code, and just didn't intend to add the MIT licence to it?
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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.
It's not like anybody except for the core team had had access before.
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.