this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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CoMaps
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Cooperative community open-source fork of Organic Maps, an offline privacy-respecting not-for-profit OpenStreetMap GPS app for your phone.
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For someone, who never heard of CoMaps why is it a big deal?
I guess it's not a big deal to someone who wasn't using / aware of OrganicMaps, but it is huge to us who loved OM.
The community is incredibly disappointed of the owners of the project (shareholders, original developers) when the volunteer force of the open-source map application wrote a revealing openletter to the owners.
The owners had been misusing the donations / funding of the project - as well as possibly (honestly, most likely) planning to sell out after years of people giving the project their free time (there is much more to this, but I'll keep it short. See the openletter for more info)
CoMaps is a community fork of OrganicMaps, so it is incredibly exciting that the FOSS volunteers have been able to fork the project, set up and organize everything, and are going forward at this speed!
It truly shows the power of FOSS and how companies can't just take something away from all the people who contributed for free and out of passion.
Hope that answers your question! :)
Edit: added more context.
Really appreciate the detailed answer. I'm not a power user of Organic Maps (mostly using Magic Earth for driving), but I have it installed for over a year now and was not aware of whats going on with it.
As Im a huge fan of FOSS I will definitely give it a try.
Glad I could answer!
Yeah I had no idea either how bad it was until another user on lemmy pointed out the company that has been set up by the owners, and then one day @Sunshine@lemmy.ca posted the open letter in !organicmaps@sopuli.xyz.
And other good news: the community fork developers (who also were trusted and long established contributors of OM) allowed us to make the lemmy community !CoMaps@sopuli.xyz an official community! They participate in that community too!