Organic Maps

Details

The source code of the project is provided under an Apache 2.0 license and includes third-party code (the list of which can be found here) under various open-source licenses. However, in August 2025, the license for the binary files that contain the map data used by the app was changed to a separate, non-FOSS “Organic Maps Binary Data License”, which forbids redistribution under different branding. There is no comprehensive list of files that are covered by this license, as the license text only states that it covers “compiled binary data files […], including but not limited to .mwm map files, packed_polygons.bin and other .bin files”.

In addition to that, there have been many debates over the years over some parts of the codebase (that are not part of the app itself but are necessary for it to work) being non-free or not publicly available:

• In December 2024, one of the developers announced the disclosure of the source code of the so-called “metaserver” (which is used to redirect users to the most suitable server when downloading maps) which was previously on a private repository only available to a few people in the team. The official explanation for having a closed-source metaserver was that it would prevent “unauthorized forks” from using their servers. It was also revealed that two weeks earlier, this repository had been relicensed from MIT to proprietary, in a commit that has been reverted since.
• In August 2025, one of the co-founders of Organic Maps accused the developers of CoMaps, a fork of Organic Maps, of stealing code that was not available publicly. According to the developer who took the commits in question, they were available on the map generator server, which is used to generate the binary map data files and was running on a clone of the main repository with a few additional commits. The reason cited for not merging these commits to the main repository was their “experimental” state, but there have been claims that they had already been used in production for years.
• In August 2025, when questioned about whether the code that generates the newly relicensed binary data files is FOSS, or even publicly available, one of the co-founders of Organic Maps simply answered that “Organic Maps app is FOSS” and “[they] reserve the right not to publish immediately any experimental or draft changes to [their] internal tools if authors or contributors explicitly prefer that for any reason”, before locking the discussion as spam.

In some builds of Organic Maps, the user’s location is provided by Google’s proprietary Fused Location Provider API. It was replaced by a FOSS alternative in the F-Droid builds in November 2024, making them fully FOSS until the map data relicensing of August 2025, but the suggestion to also replace it in the builds distributed on the Google Play Store appears to never have been implemented. Their metaserver also runs on Cloudflare, and a call to replace it with an open-source alternative does not seem to have resulted in any change either.

The project, which started in December 2020 as a fork of Maps.me, is managed by Organic Maps OÜ, a private company registered in Estonia with the three co-founders as shareholders. In April 2025, contributors wrote an open letter to Organic Maps shareholders in order to express their concerns about governance issues, among which the choice of a private company over a non-profit, lack of visibility over the future of the project, lack of transparency from the shareholders and a long-term unresolved conflict between two of them.

The project appears to be mainly funded by donations, grants and sponsorships, including the NLNet Foundation’s NGI Zero Entrust and Google’s Summer of Code programs. From November 2023 to May 2025, the app also contained referral links for a hotel booking service (added in this commit and removed in this one). Following heavy criticism from its users (see 1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), these links were made opt-in in the F-Droid builds and opt-out in the other builds in December 2024, and removed entirely in May 2025.