GitHub took a drastic step by suddenly restricting access to the project repositories of Organic Maps in an archival mode, allowing only reading access. The reason for this abrupt action has not been officially explained yet, but developers speculate that it may be due to a mistaken identification of a developer’s location, linking them to a region under sanctions.
One of the developers, through their GitHub account, received a notice about access restrictions to private repositories and paid services as they reside in a sanctioned region.
This situation mirrors the past incident involving the blocking of IPmitool’s repositories two years ago, which forced the project to swiftly migrate to the platform Codeberg. In that case, the project’s blocking was linked to the sanction-induced blocking of an account associated with the company.
Organic Maps is a project developing a free mobile navigation app using map data from OpenStreetMap. The project’s code, distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, prioritizes user privacy by avoiding location tracking and personal data collection. It is a fork of the maps.me app created by its original authors after the project’s sale to Mail.ru and transition to a different development model.