You might know of Organic Maps, the open source app that's an alternative to Google Maps. Recently, concerns have been raised about its governance, with many contributors questioning the project's transparency and direction.

Despite being advertised as a community-driven project, key decisions, including financial management, partnerships (with Kayak, for instance), and the inclusion of proprietary components in the code were made by a small group of shareholders, often without input from the broader contributor community.

These shareholders have reportedly used the project’s donation funds for personal expenses, like holiday trips, raising serious concerns about financial transparency.

As a result, many contributors teamed up and forked the project, establishing CoMaps, a new alternative focused on openness and being not-for-profit.

You might know of Organic Maps, the open source app that's an alternative to Google Maps. Recently, concerns have been raised about its governance, with many contributors questioning the project's transparency and direction.

Despite being advertised as a community-driven project, key decisions, including financial management, partnerships (with Kayak, for instance), and the inclusion of proprietary components in the code were made by a small group of shareholders, often without input from the broader contributor community.

These shareholders have reportedly used the project’s donation funds for personal expenses, like holiday trips, raising serious concerns about financial transparency.

As a result, many contributors teamed up and forked the project, establishing CoMaps, a new alternative focused on openness and being not-for-profit.

Good to see devs willing to do the work needed in order to draw hard lines on the capitalist leeches that divert money away from the project. I am looking forward to the traffic system that they mentioned as a future option. Would allow users that are okay with turning on those features for adding crowdsourced traffic data and stuff like marking cops posting up to get their quotas.

Literally the only thing that keeps me on Waze is that stuff. I have to deal with a lot of interstate travel to and from work and knowing that a big crash happened so I can re-route before getting stuck is crucial. I will still make sure to have this installed just like I had Organic Maps as a good option. And to see what stuff I go to that needs to be updated on OSM and StreetComplete. Had to add all of the addresses on my street on OSM a while ago just to be able to correctly enter my address. One of those addresses that is listed as one town for mailing and is technically within the borders of a smaller one with regards to utilities and plots of land.

Magic Earth is open source and has traffic/crowd sourced stuff like Waze

Edit: Sorry guys, I don't know why I thought Magic Earth was open source. Really looking forward to this if they get traffic data in there!

Organic maps has traffic, osmand doesn't. I feel osmand is better in pretty much every other situation but organic maps has traffic.

project’s donation funds for personal expenses, like holiday trips

I do have the same overall concerns though and for me enough reason to switch the moment its possible also.
But I tend to see the 'the holiday trips' as a symtpom instead of a problem. Later on they explained that some developers received 3 months salary worth of pay over the course of 4 years. Putting a lot more time in it during those four years. If I contributed that much for free I also would spend it on a holiday. But the problem is like you said transparancy:

• No openness of financial transactions which I guess showing salary wouldnt be a problem and if everybody was able to see the salary was reasonable. (and I dont care what people do with it in their private live).
• Maybe they didnt organise it that way (paying oneself for labour and tell everyone) but maybe they used it directly for holidays etc, which is a problem for the business entity they have I guess. Like my boss paying my holiday instead of my salary.
• Reluctant to answer questions in reasonable timeframes (couple of months)

I hope they will make the destination search much better, it's almost unusable now, and unintuitive.
Regarding traffic data, how much could it be per user per year, something like this
https://www.mapbox.com/traffic-data ?

Magic Earth search isn't that good neither. I use GMaps-WV to get the adress then, once clipped in memory, it opens MagicEarth automatically/

What was the benefit of Organic Maps over OsmAnd or other options? I never understood why Organic Maps was getting so much traction.

The only difficulty I find with Magic Earth is if you type in the address differently than it is in the system, it doesn't always find it. "Highway" vs "hwy", etc. But it's way better than OSM+, whose search is borderline unusable.

Switching is possible now, if you want. CoMaps builds have been released for a while, and are in f-droid I think since today? I have no idea about Google play store.

I can't find it on fdroid.

I had to go to the F-droid setting, click on Include Anti-Features, then enable 'Tethered Network Services' for it to show up in the F-droid search.

Thank you!! I have it now.

I can't find it on fdroid.

Is this ai?

@pineapple @lewdian69 does it have traffic? Who provides that data?

Thanks for asking i've been wondering myself actually. I looked it up and organic maps doesn't actually do traffic, although magic earth does (another not foss but apparenty privacy respecting map app that uses osm) It says it's just crowdsourced from the general public who uses magic earth (in an anonimous way, I guess there are enough magic earth uses for it to work since Some people say it works really well. (although others say it doesn't you should probably try it for yourself.)

On another note that I also found from my research just then, traffic knowing apps don't actually improve travel times but they do make previously congested places more congested.
sources:

source 1

source 2

source 3

Edit: Magic earth is not foss so there is no way to varify that the app is actually respecting your privacy like it says it is, i'm sorry for any confusion.