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Comment by throw738384 | Hacker News Reader

Donations are going to Organic Maps company. They have 10+ years of history. Most likely to pay for map server traffic.

Non-profit does not guarantee transparency, look at Mozilla as an example.

This fork is just a bunch of anonymous dudes on internet, who setup PayPal and replaced donate button. Until they do map data hosting, there is not much credibility!

Edit: there are 3th party mirrors for manual download, so I guess they can use those.

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Sure, that's all fine.

What I am saying is that CoMaps seem to believe that Organic-Maps-the-Company is not transparent about what they do with the donations. They have a bunch of other reasons, but this is the one that I can understand.

I can understand that they don't want to donate money to Organic-Maps-the-Company if it then uses it to write proprietary code and later sell it. Not that they necessarily do that, but that's apparently a criticism from the CoMaps dudes.

Also with mobile apps, app store users are the most "valuable" thing -- much like Maps.Me, the "app" could be sold tomorrow and what really happens is the FOSS code is thrown away or sunsetted and the users wake up to an update where their map app is now a crypto scam, or whatever. The source code can be forked, but Organic Maps "owns" millions of app store users, and can "sell" that, in a way that violates users' trust. Us volunteer developers are very against that, but unable to stop it besides protesting.

Happened with Firefox. Mozilla now has unlimited rights to use and publish, anything you see, type or upload in Firefox. And it is still marketed as "privacy" friendly. Even Micro$ft has better license in their browser!

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