Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

This project looks fantastic.

I adore Observable notebooks, but the one thing that makes me hesitate in using them for everything is that the editor component itself is closed-source and only available on https://observablehq.com/

They're great open source ecosystem supporters - they released their runtime, their parser, their standard library and all sorts of other stuff through https://github.com/observablehq - but the editor itself is their proprietary sauce.

I totally support their decision on this - it's what they're building their business around, and I want them to be successful. But as a user it does give me pause.

This project from Alex Garcia looks like a fix for exactly that. Having more-than-one editor for their notebook format (and an open source option a that) resolves my hesitancy in leaning hard into their ecosystem.

I don't even see it as a competitor to ObservableHQ - the hosted Observable editor has collaboration features that don't even make sense for a local running version.

Plus, Dataflow has some great ideas of its own - in particular the live file attachments thing.

Yeah the lack of open source prevented me from committing to observable, too, so I look forward to trying dataflow out.

Just in case this is of interest to others, some other open source browser-based computational notebook tools include:

* Starboard https://starboard.gg/ * And of course there's always Jupyter, but it requires a server component

And this isn't the same thing, more of a javascript playground (open source alternative to codepen and the like), but see also Slingcode: https://slingcode.net/

Thank you for the awesome recommendations! Note that Dataflow isn't open source yet, though.

Fixed, as per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27149141!

I agree that the proprietary editor has been a showstopper for what is otherwise a very appealing advance in programming environments; many of us are old enough to have learned the hard way not to base our careers on proprietary infrastructure.

But it's not clear that this new project is a fix for that: there's no license file or licensing notice on https://github.com/asg017/dataflow and no mention of licensing in https://observablehq.com/@asg017/introducing-dataflow. So, unfortunately, under Berne Convention copyright laws (which is most of them nowadays) the software is by default restricted by copyright, and looking at it may put you at legal risk, because access plus substantial similarity is deemed to prove copying.

Now, possibly that isn't their intention; https://github.com/asg017/dataflow/blob/main/package.json does say "license": "ISC", so maybe it's just an oversight. But I'd like to see a much clearer and more unambiguous statement of their intent to irrevocably commit Dataflow to an open source license before touching it.

hey author here, you're right, completely missed adding a permissive license. Just added an explicit MIT license with the latest version, thanks for bringing it up!

That's wonderful! A significant step toward fully automated luxury gay space communism! Thank you!

It's disappointing to see an expression of gratitude for the expeditious resolution of a licensing hiccup downvoted to -4. I'm left to speculate on why so many people responded by downvoting it as if it were spam.

Possibility 1: they are opposed to full automation?

Possibility 2: they don't think software licensing is a potential obstacle to full automation or sufficiently equitable access to the resulting abundance?

Possibility 3: they just have no idea what fully automated luxury gay space communism is, and lack the curiosity to look it up, and so they react without thinking?

Possibility 4: they hate luxury or gay people, so they object on principle to the vision of the future embodied in the phrase?

Possibility 5: they don't think human-factors improvements in software development environments rise to the level of importance implied by my thanks? (But if so, why are they reading this thread at all?)

I'm curious what could possibly motivate this kind of astoundingly hostile reaction.

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