CoMaps emerges as an Organic Maps fork

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.

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 questions". However, Oleg Risewell opposed the idea, saying that CoMaps 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.

Index entries for this article
GuestArticles	Crane, Sebastian

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