Yeah, it’s dangerous for a community to tolerate and adopt closed-source software. We should have done a better job pressuring them to license it openly.

The OSM wiki pointed me to Maperitive first, but I wish it pointed me to qgis first. We should probably edit the wiki with a huge warning banner that the code is closed, the app is full of bugs, and that it is not (and can not be) updated.

Edit: I took my own advice and added a big red box to the top of the article warning the user and pointing them to QGIS instead.

Edit 2: Do we have any way to know when the latest version of Maperitive (v2.4.3) was released? Usually I’d check the git repo, but…

Edit 3: stat on the Maperitive-latest.zip file says that it’s last modified 2018-02-27 17:25:07, so it’s at least 6 years old.

Hi, Michael Altfield here. I was the sysadmin for OSE from 2017-2020.

Everything OSE does is transparent, so you can just check the OSE websites to see what everyone is currently working-on. OSE contributors log their hours in a worklog called “OSE Dev”. There you can quickly see who is working on what.

• https://osedev.org/graphs

The above graphs show 4 contributors in the past ~10 weeks (one is me; we had some issues with the apache config recently). There’s no direct link, but you can then check the wiki to see people’s work logs (just search for the person’s name and Log):

• https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Marcin_Log
• https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Catarina_Log
• https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Alexa_Log
• https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Maltfield_Log

I also like to look at the MediaWiki “Recent Changes” page to peak at what people are up-to as well:

• https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&limit=500&days=30

I told Marcin about Lemmy back in June 2023. Another OSE contributor even created an OSE community on the slrpnk.net instance, but it appears to have been abandoned. I’ll email him about this thread to see if he’ll bite and publish updates in this community since there’s clearly interest :)

Also, shameless plug: I started an org that’s very similar in spirit to OSE called Eco-Libre, with a focus on projects to sustainably enfranchise human rights in smaller communities. We’re currently accepting volunteers ;)

• https://eco-libre.org/join