Oh yes, eventually! I’m so happy to see this — Open Letter to Organic Maps Shareholders — I cannot truly even explain you why.
But I’ll try to.
I despised Maps With Me for various reasons, one of which them selling to mail.ru (yeah, .ru is of Russia).
The whole idea, and implementation, I have not much to say. The maps were useful when I used them a couple of times, in some distant areas.
I don’t like the project as it feels like piggybacking on Open Street Map. So to me, their entire business process looks like ‘let’s take this open-source database, make an interface for it, slap open-source on ours, and let the community do the rest.’
Wait. Sell. Rinse. Repeat.
Upon the creation of Organic Maps, I didn’t understand why is this project any different. They made app-1, they sold it, then they forked it into app-2, and continued working on it? What is the logic behind it?
Were they themselves working on it? Or did they just created the entity and let others do the work for them?
I didn’t use the service mostly because it felt not right for me, for some reason. Something was off.
That’s why I’m happy (in a way) to see these news. To me, it just a confirmation that my intuition wasn’t incorrect. It smelt fishy from the very start.
Rule of thumb: never trust Mail.ru Group and russians.
I wish the new project luck. I hope their founders aren’t Russians or Belarusians. Otherwise, it’s destined to be all over again. Yeah, sell to Yandex this time, maybe.