CoMaps is a fork of the Organic Maps project, which develops a mobile application for autonomous navigation with OpenStreetMap cartographic data. The fork was founded by community members who were dissatisfied with the project's dependence on the interests of shareholders of the commercial company Organic Maps OÜ, the closed nature of the management process, and the lack of transparency in the distribution of donations.
The created fork will be developed according to the principles of openness, transparency, and collaboration. A governing board, elected from community representatives, will be responsible for decision-making. A domain comaps.app, but the site has not yet launched.
The CoMaps project structure implies that it is purely non-commercial and accountable to the community. The main goal of the fork is to work for the benefit of the community, not for profit. All resources, code base and intellectual property will belong to the community and will be distributed only under an open license.
The following principles are stated in terms of the application’s functionality:
- Offline-focused. Route planning, navigation, waypoint search and other features work without the need for a global network connection.
- Privacy Concern: The app does not collect or send user activity data, does not assign users identifiers, does not track movement, and does not display advertising.
- Battery Saver: Efficient power consumption to maximize battery life.
- Developing functionality by the community and for the community.
The Organic Maps project is developing free mobile applications (Android, iOS, alpha support Linux) for offline navigation, using map data from OpenStreetMap. The project's code is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. The application emphasizes ease of use and privacy (it does not track user location or collect personal data). Organic Maps is based on a fork of the MAPS.ME application, created in part by its original authors after Mail.ru sold MAPS.ME to Daegu Limited, which transitioned the project to a proprietary development model.
Source: opennet.ru
