Boycott all US based services.
This is the way.
There is some serious crapitalist hate for organic maps. I never heard of it util is was taken off the play store for a bit. I side loaded it that day.
Organic Maps is not at feature parity with paid options but it is pretty damn good for FOSS. I use it almost daily for driving around city/suburban Australia and it very rarely gives me bad directions - certainly no more than the paid option i previously used (Sygic).
I love organic maps, sometimes I practice navigation by turning location off and using a compass with the downloaded map on my phone.
So wait.
GitHub is Microsoft?
EDIT: Okay, fuck that. I was just getting all set up there but not now.
I am trying to decide between PyCharm and VS Code for my Python IDE. I was leaning toward VS Code, but they’re Microsoft too, aren’t they?
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why is Organic Street Maps better than the other ones, that claim to be Open Street Maps derived?
bandwidth is not disposable ya’ll.
Two reasons:
- interface rocks
- maps are downloaded for offline use
I’ve been using OsmAnd for years, and offline maps has always been one of their main things.
OsmAnd is okay, but I really like the interface of Organic Maps better.
Organic Maps is definitely easier to use, especially for new users but OsmAnd is more powerful. I have both and they’re awesome.
I wish there was some way to share the assets since they use the same base data. I use osmand because I find it better for hiking and route planning to send to my watch, but would use organic as well if I I didn’t need to keep two copies of the maps.
Yeah I know what you mean. Map downloads especially can take up a lot of space/take a lot of mobile data to download. I tried to copy them across manually once but it didn’t work.
Yeah it seems like they use different “chunks” so I don’t think it would be cross compatible.
that’s enough for me, except are the other ones not good?
downloading maps for offline – you nuts? how does anyone profit from the clicks?
They don’t - but at the same time it saves a ton of money on bandwidth
that is an extra plus feature i always wanted from a “smart” phone - offline maps. i spent money on some of those apps back when it was kicking off and a very few of them were actually helpful, like showing me actual USGS topo maps.
would not have helped me that much for survival on my Hawaiian big island fuckabout, because even the big island is not big enough to get truly lost. i tried!
eventually I went downhill on the volcano towards the ocean for a day or two until cell reception and called my girlfriend and told her I hit my head pretty hard and she should come get me.
still the maps would have been super interesting. also, Red River Gorge, and all the southwestern N. America desert.
I tried a lot of them and i like the interface of Organic the best.
https://mastodon.social/@organicmaps/114155428924741370
Looks like a contributor was in a sanctioned region?
Insane that Github blocked their entire development without discussing it with them though. Ban the contributor, not the entire open source project.
Sounds like an easy way to do unproportional damage to projects with a bit of location spoofing.
I was very surprised to learn that .NET has an entire team in North Korea
And all of them sharing a single 26k connection, too
I heard they got upgraded to DSL
Looks like a contributor was in a sanctioned region?
Not according to that thread - it looks like they don’t yet know what caused it:
https://mastodon.social/@organicmaps/114178916120483761
No any details from GitHub yet. One contributor mentioned a temporary visit to disputed areas a long time ago — GitHub probably just flagged the account, and their bots messed up after that.
sanctioned region
What’s that?
A country the USA doesn’t like
Nice!
I actually recently set up my own Forgejo instance, and it’s remarkably similar to GitHub, to the point where they share Github’s “actions” code.
Congrats! More hosting diversity is a good thing.
What is really needed is a fediverse for git repos
First off, that’s literally what Forgejo is trying to do
Secondly, git is technically already federated.
Things are a lot better than you might think. It’s just that people naturally gravitate towards centralized services, because of the network effect.
So why were they blocked?
One of their main contributors are in US sanctioned regions (Russia) so they can’t access it.
Really! Can’t believe them. Yeah fk microsoft.
Russia is being sanctioned because of its aggressive war against Ukraine.
Microsoft aren’t the bad guys for enforcing international sanctions.
So a person that happens to be iving in a sanctioned country, makes them banned? Bullshit
Yes. That’s how sanctions work.
Part of the intention is to pressure citizens of the country for violating international law so they exert pressure on their governments to stop.
Another part is to remove the use of tooling to support the sanctioned nation.
Russia could stop the war and problem is solved. This isn’t Microsoft being the bad guy, this is Microsoft following international law.
Does that work?
Is it right to tell random people “hey you, it’s your job to break local laws and topple your dictator, we could invade you with actual trained military people but that would be inconvenient for us”?
“Is it right?” Are you kidding? Yes, it’s obviously a better alternative than invading another country and killing people. It’s one of the ways we have learned, as a species, to avoid massive wars and losses of life. If you’re advocating for war as an alternative then you should fuck off and die so you don’t get other people killed in the process.
Sanctions are bullshit economic violence. This is a great example.
Anyone have the story behind this? Fuck Microsoft and all that, but Github has historically been pretty good when it comes to not banning people for stupid reasons. Usually, it’s a DMCA thing or a valid security threat.
Recently, there was some controversy about closed source code powering a component of the project (https://github.com/orgs/organicmaps/discussions/9837) but I didn’t keep up with that. Could this ban be related to that?
Some contributer got flagged by US sanctions based on their IP, I think
Welcome to the “free world”.
conservative: says a racial slur
Online Platform: bans user
conservative: “sO mUcH fOr tHe tOlEraNt lEfT 😡”
Person: *makes map app for everyone to use*
Twitter baby: “Racial slurs! Racial slurs!”
can someone make a quick intro to what happends for microsoft to block organicmaps account ?
Going by their Mastodon account, seems they were erroneously detected as “from a US-sanctioned region” and it took too long for said error to be resolved, so they just made the switch.
“US sanctioned region” is russia. The developer team fully consist of russian citizens, some of them are still in russia.
Aren’t they now based in Estonia since when the company was established?
They can be de jure in Estonia and de facto wherever they want.
E.g OnlyOffice claim to be based in baltics too, but the development office is still in Nizhniy Novgorod(russia).
De jure is what’s good enough for me. I am not interested in vindicating ordinary Russians for something they couldn’t even vote for.
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Are you aware of how much open source work comes from Russians? Russians != Russian govt.
Fuck russia. Honestly this post makes Microsoft, Github and USA look good, and Organic Maps look bad. Organic maps should ban russian developers from contributing.
I… don’t follow. How does this make the Microsoft, Github, and USA look good? The policy here is absolutely stupid.
Me too. I presume half of the votes on this comment are upvotes because they only read the first half of it.
Can you please explain how you come to such a conclusion of your second half, OP? Like you saw, we really don’t follow.
I don’t think I want my government deciding who can contribute to my open source project.
When Trump gets into a dick measuring contest with a US ally and sanctions them, POOF foreign contributors are gone. Community management, codebase familiarity, and open PRs be damned. It’ll kill open source projects.
Moving off of GitHub is still good, even if you believe their reasoning behind their reasons is incorrect.
Upvoting for the concise summary of what the article is about (thanks!); not for the opinion expressed (which appears to conflate Russian developers with the actions of the Russian government – something I find problematic at best).
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The US supplied 80% of the bombs dropped on Gaza.
Do you believe US civilians should be prohibited from interacting with the rest of the world?
As a US citizen. YES. FFS, the point of sanctions is to compel a change or deter an action. Americans might pay way more attention when the rest of the world puts us in timeout because of the terrible leadership.
Research has shown it has historically had very little to no impact on policy. What it does do is harm the lowest rungs of society.
For example a 2019 report on Trump’s Venezeuala sanctions estimate up to 40,000 people died. Mostly poor people who went without healthcare and medicine because the US froze all of the government’s funds and access to credit.
In my opinion, I’d prefer if we just bombed civilians in the countries we sanction. It’s more honest. It really is a form of low level warfare. Something akin to a medieval raiding party
I mean, it’s probably in their best interest to avoid us. We are a terrible country.
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How the fuck is banning people in certain countries for something they don’t have control over from contributing to small projects like this doing anything but shooting the FOSS ecosystem, which already has a severe shortage of developers, in the foot?
but_what_about_.jpg
whataboutism isn’t some magical phrase that you can utter every time someone brings up hypocrisy
if we’re going to support sanctioning civilians based on their countries breaking international law, then we should not have double standards. otherwise it’s very clear to anyone paying attention that this is a geopolitical issue and not a moral one.
and that’s what this is actually about. the US sanctions on Russia are a geopolitical tool meant to make the Russian re-subjugation of Ukraine more expensive. that’s it. US doesn’t actually care about Ukraine- neither this administration or the last.
to me, that doesn’t justify banning individuals from participating in OSS projects. anybody that wants to contribute should be able to.
Russian bots down voting you.
This is how sanctions work. Don’t like it? Get your government to stop invading Ukraine.
Not a Russian bot. Down voted it because GitHub is still a poor choice to host open source on nowadays. It’s like someone saying “It’s stupid that such and such switched to renewable energy instead of fossil fuels because they believe the world is flat. The world is not flat!” It’s really missing the forest for the trees.
