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  • Roman @rtsisyk revoked Github owner permissions from Alexander @biodranik and Viktor @vng and granted such permissions to the community contributor @pastk. This triggered Github's automatic "sanctions" check and the whole Github OM organization was automatically archived and admin access was blocked until OM's appeal was reviewed. It was unknown whether and when Github would review Organic Maps' appeal and unblock the repositories, so 2 weeks later the project migrated to the self-hosted git.omaps.dev/organicmaps instance, using the free and open source software forge Forgejo.

    What the fuck? GitHub blocking the account because of automated security evaluation triggering (probably a good thing) but no review over two weeks (obviously a very bad thing)?

  • "User-first" and "public company" don't go together at all. That's just the reality. Now we just have to hope the fork doesn't die.

  • Being a private corporation should have given up the scam.

    itsfoss would have mentioned that if they weren't also a private corporation.

  • Damn.

    I absolutely hate open source drama. I don't want to read your diary when I use your software, I want it to work.

    I'm not even against running a parallel for-profit for extra features or corporate sponsorships. People gotta eat. I'd much rather have that than deal with following sob stories about ruthless leadership, ego clashes in contributors and endless forking because everybody thinks everybody else sucks.

    The more I hang out around here, where OSS is a bit of a religion, the more disenchanted I am with it and the more I think the big game changer for this space is getting contributions on usability, production and business rather than code.

    • What you call drama is a healthy community fighting against violated principles. So, according to you, what's the alternative? Just keep working with broken principles and never complain? Allow a bunch of greedy members to take over the project?

      If you have paid attention, basically community always win: libreoffice vs openoffice, mariadb over mysql, jenkins over hudson, x.org over xfree86, ffmpeg over libav, nextcloud over owncloud, etc.

      Right to fork is one of the most important to keep project in community hands and follow declared principles. Some forget that and are just doomed to repeat the history.

      Disclaimer: I work on iDempiere who forked adempiere because of community disagreements, which also forked from compiere because of corporative takeout.

      Long live to CoMaps!

      • Well, the point is I don't want CoMaps to win out over Organic Maps, I want some open source alternative to win out over Google Maps. Which is why I'd hesitate to say that LibreOffice "won" over anything, Google and Microsoft seem to be doing most of the winning in that particular space.

        In a healthy community public arguments about "violated principles" wouldn't be a frequent occurrence and wouldn't lead to atomization of projects. I'm not taking sides on this particular example (mostly because I can't be bothered to look up the drama). But I am saying that besides the confusion and negativity caused by seeing open source developers constantly bicker about their violated principles, it can be a major setback for the perception of reliability of open source software overall. For an app you install that mostly works no matter what it's one thing, but if you integrate a piece of software into a workflow and it suddenly spawns two different pieces of software with different splinters of the original team that can be a significant disruption and if you fear significant disruptions you may hesitate to rely on that particular thing in the first place.

        So do I think there shouldn't be a right to fork? Not at all. That's the whole point of open source.

        Do I think it's overall a negative for the open source ecosystem that major projects break up due to their contributors being unable to come to a decision about the direction of the project? Absolutely.

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

      That thing is definitely a problem though.

      • But it's a problem for the team, not the user, right? It's one of those things where in closed software it's either... well, the point of the thing, or if it isn't people would get quietly fired and move on trying to impact the perception of the product as little as possible.

        Here it impacts the product in that you may have to learn about it, learn about the fork and transition to the fork. There's no separation between the HR/organizational issues and the software issues, and that's a bit of a problem, I think, and why it reads as frequent drama.

    • You know, wherever you are, drama is inescapable. At least with OSS the community seems to have control over the drama.

      contributions on usability, production

      Isn't that made in code?

      • I don't know about that. I am not privvy to the internal politics of most commercial software developers and that's a good thing. I guess there is some drama about whatever layoffs, corporate business practices or enshittification those are deploying, but I am a big enough man to concede that, while objectively worse, it annoys me less. At least you get to be outraged and holier-than-thou with those instead of losing faith in the ability of smart people to be mature and collectively productive.

        And no, production practices and usability aren't the same as coding, even if they are implemented in code. Unfortunately, I do think that confusion is... widespread in that community. It's a very engineer-driven space and that has downsides. I do get why, engineers don't like to be managed on top of contributing to things freely and there are fewer people in those capacities willing to donate their time who aren't programmers with a side skill, which in aggregate explains a lot.

        Not necessarily what's happening here, but still.

    • I think it's a people issue rather than FOSS issue. People interested in this stuff are just like that.

      • That's depressing for different reasons, but still a bummer.

48 comments