The open-source mobile app Organic
Maps is used by millions of people on both the Android and iOS
platforms. In addition to featuring offline maps (generated from OpenStreetMap cartography) and
turn-by-turn navigation, it also promises its users greater privacy
than proprietary options. However, controversial decisions taken by the
project’s leaders, feelings of disenfranchisement among contributors, and
even accusations of embezzlement have precipitated a divide in the
community, leading to a new fork called CoMaps.
The creation of Organic Maps
Organic Maps traces its
ancestry back to the navigation software MapsWithMe, created by Yuri
Melnichek, Viktor Havaka, and Alexander Borsuk in 2010. Although the app
itself was released under a proprietary license, MapsWithMe used open data
from OpenStreetMap with its own rendering engine. MapsWithMe was renamed to
MAPS.ME in June 2014, shortly
before being sold to Russian internet company Mail.ru Group (now known as
VK) in December of the same year for a sum equivalent to nearly
$10 million.
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The original founders continued working on the software as employees of
Mail.ru until 2016. During this period, MAPS.ME was released as open-source
software for the first time, with its code being made available under the
Apache-2.0 license on GitHub.
Four years of steady development followed, but this status quo came to an
abrupt end in November 2020 when Mail.ru sold MAPS.ME, considering the app
a “non-core” part of
its business. By the end of 2020, MAPS.ME’s new owner had completely
rewritten the software around a different rendering engine, returning
again to a proprietary license in the process, albeit still using
OpenStreetMap data.
The new version of MAPS.ME was met with widespread disapproval from its
users, and OMaps was released merely days later as a community fork of the
last open-source version of MAPS.ME. The main driving force behind OMaps
was Roman Tsisyk, described
as the project’s “interim project manager”, but Havaka and
Borsuk — two of the original MAPS.ME developers — were also
active contributors. OMaps became Organic Maps in
April 2021.
Disquiet in the Organic Maps community
In November 2023, contributors noticed an unexpected
pull request to the Organic Maps GitHub repository by Tsisyk. Users who
selected hotels in the app were to be shown a button that would take them
to the hotel’s listing on KAYAK, a travel search engine owned by
Booking.com. As described in the release
notes:
After selecting some hotels, you can see an experimental “Details
on Kayak” button that opens the Kayak website with photos and
reviews about the selected hotel. If you make any booking using
this button, Organic Maps receives a small referral bonus to fund
the project development.
These links did not contain any data that could be used to identify the
user, but they would tell KAYAK that the user arrived from Organic
Maps. Community members immediately
began voicing concerns; some felt that the change compromised Organic
Map’s promises of privacy, some objected to what they felt was advertising
(a description vehemently opposed by Tsisyk and Borsuk),
and others simply questioned why they had not been consulted when
Tsisyk merged his own pull request less than two weeks after creating
it. F-Droid marked
Organic Maps with an “antifeature” label to warn users of the presence
of advertisements.
Tsisyk had told
the FLOSS Weekly podcast only six months prior that advertising was not
on the table for Organic Maps:
Because if you don’t have ads, you don’t have tracking, you don’t
collect personal data, you don’t need to send any data to any
server… we are not in this business, you know, in the business of
showing advertisements. So we don’t need to do it.
One year later, Tsisyk took another step that would spark
controversy. In December 2024 he revealed
that, since 2021, there had been a server component that was kept secret from
the wider community. The Organic Maps app, he said, used this when
downloading maps to select the fastest mirrors. His rationale for this
disclosure was a decision by Borsuk to remove a copy of the MIT
license from the component’s hidden repository, and then to enable logging
of requests to the server:
This subtle, almost unnoticed modification effectively privatized
the open-source repository by this individual, preventing any
further open-source collaboration. Furthermore, the next change of
enabling the logs, clearly violates our commitment to privacy. To
my knowledge, this decision was not discussed with any other
contributors, including those who had previously contributed to the
repository.
Tsisyk said he had reverted Borsuk’s changes:
I am making the code from before November 23, 2024, publicly
available again under MIT. As one of the authors who contributed to
the code while it was under the MIT license, I have the full right
to take this action. Proprietary changes after “No MIT yet, sorry”
and “Observe server abusers when needed” has been removed or
reverted.
Borsuk did not dispute that he made the changes, but retaliated
by removing
Tsisyk’s privileged access to Organic Map’s GitHub
organization. According to Tsisyk, Havaka restored his
access the next week.
Open letter
These growing tensions came to a head on April 16, when an open
letter was sent to Havaka, Tsisyk, and Borsuk. The authors of the
letter were not disclosed, but the early signatories include active
contributors to Organic Maps. The letter outlined demands for a governance
structure that would, among other things, guarantee that Organic Maps
cannot become a for-profit venture.
In an addendum, the authors elaborated further, with specific allegations
of mismanagement, including the claim that Tsisyk attempted to remove
Borsuk and Havaka from the GitHub organization, causing GitHub to freeze
the repository. Another accusation is that Borsuk misappropriated
donations to fund a personal vacation. To date, no sources for either of
these two claims have been provided in the letter or its subsequent
follow-up messages.
Financial transparency is a key theme in the letter:
At the same time all other contributors were consistently denied
any access to any financial information (even to the totals of
money donated/spent).
The legal entity owned by Havaka and Tsisyk, which they established in July
2021 to manage Organic Map’s finances and trademark, is registered in
Estonia as an osaühing, a type of limited-liability company. This
means that annual
financial reports are available from the Estonian e-Business
Register. However, the claim is not unfounded; these reports only contain
basic company information and a balance sheet, and don’t include records of
individual transactions. Additionally, the 2024 annual report has not yet
been published, so the effects of the KAYAK affiliate links and other
actions may not be visible until the end of June, when the 2024 report is due.
CoMaps is born
While waiting for a response from the letter’s recipients, some community
members started preparing to fork Organic Maps. By the end of April,
Organic Maps’s source code had been copied to a new repository on Codeberg
and donations started to be
accepted on OpenCollective. The preliminary name for the fork was
CoMaps; it was decided to use this permanently after a public vote
that ended on May 20.
Progress in the establishment of this project has been swift; as of this
writing, the CoMaps project already has a web site, accounts on almost all
major social-media platforms, and a preview version
of the app available for Android devices.
However, the development of CoMaps as an independent community has not been
without its own tensions. Prompted by a discussion to choose a logo for
CoMaps, “mray”, a designer, suggested the
creation of a formal “design lead” role that would be responsible for
“lead[ing] the effort to find answers to the most pressing branding
“. However, Oleg Risewell opposed the idea, saying that CoMaps
questions
was to have no defined leaders:
CoMaps operates differently than a typical company, and even
differently than other FOSS projects. As contributors there are no
formal roles, even a person who will be hired at some point will be
a contributor who contributes a lot. People contribute work for
everyone, and others who are interested can weigh in. Often the
input is very valuable and helps improve the final result
significantly. The organization is horizontal, and there is less
reliance on judgement of one person and more focus on a
collaborative approach.
The discussion did not lead to a compromise, and mray closed
the issue in frustration. Regardless of whether CoMaps has defined
leaders, it is becoming clear who the movers and shakers are. Of the 488
comments on CoMap’s governance repository at
the time of writing, just over half are from the top three commenters: 127
(26%) were written by Risewell, 93 (19%) by Konstantin Pastbin, and 39
(8%) by “Zyphlar”. The remaining 47% of comments were written by 67 other
people. Looking at the commits in the repository show Pastbin as the top
contributor so far.
The future
It is unlikely that the fork will affect users directly, at least in the
near future. As negotiation efforts mentioned in the open letter are
seemingly at an impasse, it seems probable that Organic Maps and CoMaps
will coexist and be developed independently, with both options available
in app stores.
One possible eventuality for the two projects is a soft fork, where the
apps are developed in parallel, with different funding sources and
development teams but sharing mostly identical source code. This
organization could be complicated by a proposal made on
May 12 to relicense CoMaps under the GNU AGPLv3 rather than the current
Apache-2.0 license, a suggestion already attracting significant discussion
on Codeberg and Zulip. In
such a case, Organic Maps would be forced to follow suit and adopt the AGPL
in order to incorporate improvements contributed first to CoMaps, whereas
CoMaps would face no legal problems taking patches from Organic
Maps. Pastbin had already advocated for Organic Maps to be relicensed under
a copyleft license back in
September 2023, but this idea was mostly ignored and made no headway.
Another scenario is that CoMaps and Organic Maps diverge over time until
patches from one cannot easily be applied to the other, resulting in a hard
fork. This was the eventual situation for Forgejo, which was forked from Gitea under somewhat similar
circumstances.
Could a compromise be found, and the CoMaps and Organic Maps efforts fold
back into a single project? Such a resolution is not unheard of in the
open-source community. In 2016, the router firmware OpenWrt was forked to produce LEDE,
prompted by familiar concerns about transparency. But less than two years
later, they merged back together again, keeping the OpenWrt name but
incorporating governance processes from LEDE.
The history of MAPS.ME is ample evidence that the OpenStreetMap community
is not one to let a good code base die. But what if worst comes and
the fork really does split the community and hamper development? Luckily,
users are not without alternatives for open-source navigation
apps. For instance, OsmAnd has a
distinct pedigree from Organic Maps and CoMaps, but shares a
similar feature set. Those who contribute to OpenStreetMap may be
interested in StreetComplete,
which creates location-specific “quests” ranging from identifying road
surfaces to recording the collection times of mailboxes, as well as
offering a basic editor for adding new map features. Both are available
under the GPLv3 license, although OsmAnd contains some proprietary
graphics.
There are many immediate decisions still to be made by the CoMaps
developers. They can select a conventional non-profit structure,
establishing a governing board and formally electing leaders, or they can
pursue a more ad-hoc governance model as advocated by Risewell. In either
case, the community could still slip into a “benevolent dictator for life”
model, be it Risewell, Pastbin, or someone else at the helm. It is not as
if those remaining on the Organic Maps side will have an easy ride either;
discussions between the shareholders are apparently still stalled, and any
aspirations for a commercial funding model will be threatened by the
prospect of competing with the resolutely non-profit CoMaps community for
market share. The future presents uncharted territory for
both projects.