Honestly even reading his prior blog post and this together, his own outline of his position made me feel there was more to it. Like the way I read it, they had a process of open contribution, and then they closed it down, partly at the author's suggestion, and then those contributors who felt the process was too onerous because of pushback against perceived euro-centrism of their contributions went and made their own projects.... which were more succesful for Europe and North America.

Sounds like open source working correctly. If someone doesn’t agree they can always fork the project and aim for their own direction.

Absolutely possible; that's not the problem here.

The deeper problem is that Carto gets a free ride on the website as the incumbent house style. You can fork it, but doesn't make it the default style shown on openstreetmap.org. You could fork it, get popular community support, and still get nowhere except for wasting a lot of effort, because displacing Carto takes a lot of political manoeuvring as well as server resources for hosting the default style (which are not insignificant).

If it was a matter of just forking it, and have the openstreetmap.org website maintainer pick it up if it proved more popular than that would be that, but given the fact that the one other Carto maintainer who seems semi-active is also a member of the OpenStreetMap operations working group (i.e., server resources), spending any effort on a fork with the goal to displace Carto seems pointless at this point in time. I prefer to spend my resources on just making the map better.

Some people justly pick up their crayons and go make a nice thing elsewhere (like the Americana style), or contribute to the styles used by popular apps. For now part of the community just gave up on Carto and is waiting to see how developments for the new vector style will pan out.

And as always, forking might solve a specific issue, but creates so many new ones that it isn't such a clearcut and obvious or even sensible solution.

I wouldn't compare osm-website and osm-carto at all. The commit logs are very different.

openstreetmap-website: https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/commi... . Numerous commits most days.

openstreetmap-carto: https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/commits . So far in 2024; one small regression fixed, one niche bit of tagging added to an existing style, some largely pointless code style tidying. That's it.

Sure, you're right - I haven't checked osm-carto in a while. Nonetheless, the barrier to contributing to osm-website is too high and the maintainers also not welcoming. TomH is infamous for his comments that brush off even OSMF board members. The openstreetmap-website is due for improvements, but the same thing applies - maintainers are very finicky and even worse, one of them is abrasive as hell.

Elsewhere in the comments it was pointed out about hostility to experimentation, the same applies to openstreetmap-website. There are many things that could be tried on the front-end, but in the eyes of TomH you need to be perfect at the first shot, based on his understanding of the situation.

Somebody pointed out that openstreetmap-website contributions pace curiously picked up after the NorthCrab's blogs detailing his unofficial and unsolicited Python rewrite, OpenStreetMap NG. Honestly even if he's somewhat cringe at times, he's still more adaptive than TomH and co. E.g. people pointed out that Mongo is fauxpen source so he duly rewrote the DB part in Postgres.