CoMaps has been introduced — a fork of the Organic Maps project, which develops a mobile application for offline navigation using OpenStreetMap cartographic data. The fork is based on community members dissatisfied with the project's dependency on the interests of the shareholders of the commercial company Organic Maps OÜ, the lack of transparency in management processes, and opaque donation distribution.
The created fork will develop in accordance with the principles of openness, transparency, and collaboration. A governing council, elected from community representatives, will be responsible for decision-making. The project has been registered under domain comaps.app, but the website is not yet launched.
The structure of the CoMaps project implies that it will engage only in non-commercial activities and will be accountable to the community. The main goal of the fork is to work to meet the community's interests rather than to generate profit. All resources, codebase, and intellectual property will belong to the community and will be distributed only under an open license.
The application’s functionality is stated to include the following principles:
- Focus on offline operation. Route planning, navigation, point of interest searches, and other features function without the need for a connection to the global network.
- Privacy protection. The application does not collect or send user activity data, does not assign identifiers to users, does not track movements, and does not display advertisements.
- Battery efficiency. Effective energy consumption to maximize offline usage.
- Community-driven functionality development for the community.
The Organic Maps project develops free mobile applications (Android, iOS, alpha support for Linux) for offline navigation that utilize OpenStreetMap cartographic data. The project's code is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. The application emphasizes ease of use and privacy (it does not track the user's location and does not collect personal data). Organic Maps was founded as a fork of the MAPS.ME application, created by some of its original authors after the sale of MAPS.ME from Mail.ru to Daegu Limited, which transitioned the project to a proprietary development model.
Source: opennet.ru
