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> Why go to closed-source for something like this?

I used it when it first came out, but immediately moved away when he started talking about monetization and giving up on open source. I fully understand the desire to make money. It's just that it's a notes app and it does the same thing as a gazillion similar apps. When this app goes away you've wasted your money and your time for no reason.

> I fully understand the desire to make money.

I don't think people understand that generally if something is financially unsustainable it will die, it's sad that even computer people don't like paying for the software they depend on.

Author here, commenting on the "Why go to closed-source for something like this?":

I just couldn't justify to myself continuing working on it full-time, while still not making any revenue, and open-sourcing all of it. So far I've been working on it for about 18 months full-time and I haven't made a penny from it really, some people are generous enough to donate some money to me, but it's extremely difficult to make a living off of open-source.

If anybody doesn't feel the same way about this they are more than welcome to fork the app and take the full open-source path themselves of course.

Thanks for the reply! Like I said below to another poster, for me it would be a detractor when choosing a new app. For me it's about continuity. Especially in case you couldn't continue working on it for whatever reason, it would still maintain a lot of important data for me. I'd be more comfortable if the source was available so it could be continued if abandoned.

Also (also mentioned this below), hinting that there's monetisation coming up but not specifying any details, will put potential users off.

There's so many payment models you could go for, like a monthly/yearly or lifetime license. I personally hate subscription-based services, no matter how cheap they are, I prefer to spend a bigger amount once. Other people will feel differently, but by not saying anything you're leaving this as a potential concern in a customer's mind as the price and payment model may not suit them in the future.

One thing you might consider is open the source but not legally leaving it open, so using a more restrictive license. Electron apps are never really closed-source anyway as it uses interpreted languages. Opening the source doesn't really preclude charging for it.

I wasn't saying this because I want the app for free (even though it seems to be free right now?). It was just my thoughts as a potential user. I personally have a pet peeve against electron, and what I would be looking for would be more barebones and keyboard-oriented anyway, so I won't use it either way. But I'm sure it will fit the needs of many others.

Anyway not all users/customers are the same but these are just my personal concerns when I saw this. I wasn't aware of Notable. I do wish you the best of luck though and I hope you can make it deliver a decent income!

> Like I said below to another poster, for me it would be a detractor when choosing a new app. For me it's about continuity. Especially in case you couldn't continue working on it for whatever reason, it would still maintain a lot of important data for me. I'd be more comfortable if the source was available so it could be continued if abandoned.

Right, but if it doesn't make economic sense to put development time into the app in the first place you can essentially consider an app dead already. Potentially this may sound counter intuitive, but paying for closed-source software (closed because otherwise most people won't open up the wallet) may make the software you depend on _more_ sustainable than if it was open-source.

> Also (also mentioned this below), hinting that there's monetisation coming up but not specifying any details, will put potential users off.

How did you get that feeling? It probably happened that I didn't fully quality what I meant by that for the 100th time somewhere, but I tend to remember to write that the mobile app will be paid essentially.

> I personally hate subscription-based services, no matter how cheap they are, I prefer to spend a bigger amount once.

Right, I've heard this comment a bunch of times. So how much do you think you should pay Notable for hosting all your notes and attachments forever? Let's not even account for development time or anything else.

> One thing you might consider is open the source but not legally leaving it open, so using a more restrictive license. Electron apps are never really closed-source anyway as it uses interpreted languages. Opening the source doesn't really preclude charging for it.

Any binary can be patched, using Electron doesn't mean that apps are open-source.

> I personally have a pet peeve against electron, and what I would be looking for would be more barebones and keyboard-oriented anyway, so I won't use it either way.

Notable's zen mode is about as bare-bones as it gets, and if you try the shortcuts system in one of the alphas of v1.9 it's even better than vscode's in some areas.

The problem arises when you are a dev trying put food on the table.

It's easy to talk about how other people's work should be given for free when you have a source of income every month, and your basic needs are covered.

But if the author is trying to live of his work, as it's the case here, it's a decision that should be respected.

And Yes, you can disagree with him, and in that case, you can vote with your wallet by not buying it and using any other app.

Well in this case he offers the binary app for free anyway (he only asks for voluntary contributions), so I don't really see how making it closed-source would affect this.

I often support open-source projects financially and I would be a lot less likely to support this now that it's not. It's not just a matter of giving anything for free. It's about continity: That someone else can carry on with the app (and the data I've put in it!) if he decides to give up on it.

But like I said I don't like this particular app anyway for the reasons I mentioned so I don't use it. It would however be a big detractor for me when looking for a new app.

Especially this thing would put me off: "I've decided to figure out how to make it sustainable first before figuring out potentially how to license it, in order to make this less risky for me."

So in other words, there will be monetisation coming later, but no indication on what kind of price or payment model (think monthly, lifetime etc) he will go for. This would be a big uncertainty for me if I were to consider spending time to put my data into this thing. Who knows if I'll find the upcoming price acceptable. This and the continuity thing would make it a non-starter for me, and I assume many others too. Don't forget the market of notetaking apps is very crowded.

> Well in this case he offers the binary app for free anyway (he only asks for voluntary contributions), so I don't really see how making it closed-source would affect this.

Building the thing that one can sell takes time you know.

> I often support open-source projects financially and I would be a lot less likely to support this now that it's not.

Do you think honestly that you would spend more on software if everything you depend on was closed source or less? It's not a matter of being greedy, it's just human nature, if one can get something for free it's way less likely that one's going to pay for it, or pay fairly for it.

> It's about continity: That someone else can carry on with the app (and the data I've put in it!) if he decides to give up on it.

I'm not sure I agree with that, if I decide to abandon Notable because it doesn't make financial sense to me, how do you think is going to continue its development? Like if something is not financially sustainable it's probably dead int he first place.

Plus this argument for an app like Notable where notes are written in Markdown and they really truly _are_ the database of the app doesn't make a lot of sense, I don't think you can get less "no vendor lock-in" than this.

> So in other words, there will be monetisation coming later, but no indication on what kind of price or payment model (think monthly, lifetime etc) he will go for.

I haven't figured out the pricing yet, it's probably going to be something around 5 bucks a month. Lifetime licenses are unsustainable, like how much do you think you should pay Notable for hosting all your notes and attachments forever?

> Building the thing that one can sell takes time you know.

I know, but open-source does not mean free (as in beer), and closed-source does not mean paid. They are essentially unrelated things. You can publish the source but not license it.

> I'm not sure I agree with that, if I decide to abandon Notable because it doesn't make financial sense to me, how do you think is going to continue its development? Like if something is not financially sustainable it's probably dead int he first place.

This disregards the many great free apps that are around :)

But anyway this point came from having the bad experinece of having all my notes in a system that pretty much got abandoned, and it really helped that it was open source to export my notes from its XML format. That's the main reason for that point from my side.

> I haven't figured out the pricing yet, it's probably going to be something around 5 bucks a month. Lifetime licenses are unsustainable, like how much do you think you should pay Notable for hosting all your notes and attachments forever?

Ah, like I said I didn't use the app but I wouldn't really want a note system that uses third-party servers anyway. I'd want to self-host it. With Tomboy I used to just sync its files with OwnCloud (because the built-in sync server was not great).

However that pricing comes very close to other commercial options that are highly regarded, like EverNote (7 euro/month) or OneNote (you can get OneNote on a 5 euro per month O365 subscription that also includes email hosting and 1TB OneDrive). The 'hosted' notetaking market is very competitive. I'm not looking for a hosted option myself but I do know the market (and I use OneNote in work as it's the only thing I'm allowed to use there :( )

> I know, but open-source does not mean free (as in beer), and closed-source does not mean paid. They are essentially unrelated things. You can publish the source but not license it.

And what has that to do with your comment about not seeing the point of closing the source when the app is still free? I've answered why releasing the code with a stricter license (or no license) wasn't a viable strategy for me in a reply to the first comment in this HN posting.

> This disregards the many great free apps that are around :)

Which apps have at least the equivalent of somebody working full-time on them for free? And how long do you think that can go on?

> Ah, like I said I didn't use the app but I wouldn't use a note system that uses third-party servers anyway. I'd want to self-host it.

Of course you do, what do you think a fair pricing for that would be then?

> However that pricing comes very close to other commercial options that are highly regarded, like EverNote (7 euro/month) or OneNote (you can get OneNote on a 5 euro per month O365 subscription that also includes email hosting and 1TB OneDrive).

I wouldn't say Evernote is highly regarded, but anyway it's not always about finding the cheapest thing out there, for example I want to write my notes with Markdown, it doesn't matter to me if Evernote or OneNote are free if I can't do that with those apps.

Hey I don't want to keep discussing as it starts to feel like an argument and that was never my intention :)

But I'd pay 20-40 euro for a good notetaking app with self-host capability. Maybe 50 if it's really good.

I agree the discussion in starting to get annoying.

Let me just mention that with that amount of money I can buy about 2~5 fresh pizzas, if a good note-taking app provides about the same value to you maybe you don't even need one.

For some historical perspective, consider this. When Tomboy was new, people complained about its ‘bloat’. Why? Because it’s ‘unnecessarily’ written in .NET, and Mono was a ‘huge and bloated’ dependency.

I know, and I don't like the fact that it uses .NET either.. Especially because it doesn't use plain .NET but GTK as well. It's a bit of a hassle installing, even on Windows systems that come with .NET but not GTK.

However its performance is amazing, it's the fastest notetaking app I've ever used. And I also really loved the lack of the concept of 'saving'. Everything you type is automatically saved.

It was a little more than that. It was the only app on the live CD of several major distros that relied on Mono. That meant, back in the days of CD's that could hold 800 MB (?) you had to remove a whole lot of other stuff from the live CD, all for an app that most people didn't use. (As was pointed out at the time, what's the purpose of a notes app on a live CD, where you don't even have persistent storage?) It was widely perceived, correctly in my opinion, as a way to get Mono installed on everyone's machines. After the pushback Miguel de Icaza got pissed, trashed Linux every chance he had, and switched to Mac. I'm not going to relitigate all of that, but it wasn't just that Mono was bloated.

* Here's just one link: https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Mar-05.html

"Machine would suspend and resume without problem, WiFi just worked, audio did not stop working, I spent three weeks without having to recompile the kernel to adjust this or that, nor fighting the video drivers, or deal with the bizarre and random speed degradation that my ThinkPad suffered."

Haha that random speed degredation happened to me even in Windows. Turned out to be a bug in the T470 firmware that throttled the cores down to a couple of hundred Mhz when on battery. I could literally watch the windows being drawn. Not sure if this was what happened for him, probably not as he wrote that years before the T470 was released, but I'm just saying it's not necessarily Linux related.

But overall I've had no such issues with Linux during the last years. I use all 3 desktop platforms a lot, and my favourite was Mac, but due to Apple's constant "dumbing down" (both the OS and hardware) to appeal to the iPhone/iPad userbase it meets my needs as a power users less and less.

Is there something (very) similar to Tomboy? Man I loved that thing and considered multiple times that I should write my own version (besides are horrible vue app approach I failed on this).

Yeah I know, I miss it so much too. It was just the perfect app. Not trying to do too much, not too little, and really efficient at what it did. I could type out structured notes while on a call without even having to look at the screen. And finding them back was so much easier than in OneNote.

As I mentioned there is Tomboy-NG: https://github.com/tomboy-notes/tomboy-ng/releases/tag/v0.29 . It's a complete rewrite in a different language (Pascal with Qt).

It doesn't have the same ultra-fast feel of the old one though. And hyperlinks to other notes don't seem to update instantly like on the old one. I've tried it once but I never had that real "wow" feeling of the original.

One key difference is that you don't have to bundle a full copy of .NET with your app, consuming additional download bandwidth, install space, and RAM when running. Running 6 Electron apps is running 6 different browsers all at the same time.

Yes this is exactly why I don't like Electron.

But also: The UI. Electron apps have a very distinct "non-native" UX about them. Sure they look kinda pretty in many cases but they don't integrate well with every client OS. They all do their own UI thing, just like in the early days of Linux on the desktop.

There's a few gems that use Electron really well. VS Code comes to mind. But even Microsoft itself publishes some really poor electron apps, like Skype for Business and Teams for Mac that are horrible resource hogs.

I didn't even realise it wasn't open source anymore! But it is indeed up to them! Perhaps they have something planned