If you want to stand up your own private copy, contact them and arrange a fair contract where you pay them a large and entirely reasonable amount of money in exchange for a non-transferable, non-competing license to run a private, offline instance.
The phenomenon of projects existing and being openly available on GitHub has somehow led to me having an inappropriate expectation about them being FOSS. I accept it's a "me" problem.
For a relevant example, consider Adobe- they are actively hostile to sharing source code. Complete capitalist jackasses, yet Adobe doesn't generally get a hard time about it on HN or elsewhere.
- you can't learn its techniques
- you can't improve it
- you can't fix it
- the author could change their mind about distributing any part (or whole) of it at any time
- the author may include undesirable features
- the author could sell the software to someone who does the above
- the software is limited in its reach to those who can afford and have a possibility to pay for it
Of course, the author deserves every dollar for the time they spend making the software. It's unfortunate if they have to restrict the software to do that.
There is a whole philosophy about Free Software: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html
As for "the software is limited in its reach to those who can afford and have a possibility to pay for it", do you even use this app? Because it sounds like you don't, you're just commenting on it as a drive by HN reader. Everyone with internet access who wants to use this web-based "I can't believe it's not Photoshop" can do so for free.
It's free software. Just not open source.
...and hope that it's what the author wants and has time for, while you could take care of it yourself here and now rather than break an open door by starting from scratch.
> think you can do better?
What if I can't do better? It's unfortunate I can't learn.
> do you even use this app?
I've lived long enough that I had many a chance to get excluded by proprietary software because of access troubles, including mandatory internet connection.
Yes, that's how "this isn't mine and I would like to have it changed" works. You're free to want things, you're not guaranteed to get them.
> What if I can't do better? It's unfortunate I can't learn.
Then no one still owes you anything, and the fact that you get to use this software for free is still a miracle.
As for the "needing internet access": what an absolutely ridiculous thing to say. If you need a great offline image editor, just download one. There are plenty, Gimp, Krita, etc. all work perfectly fine if that's what you need, but it sounds more like you're upset about the fact that THIS particular one isn't also free for you to do with as you please, and that's just ridiculous. If you need a good offline image editor, you already have options unrelated to this amazing web offering that the author has zero obligation to make free, let alone open source.
> sounds more like you're upset about the fact that THIS particular one isn't also free
I'd call it "disappointed" rather than "upset", and the original wording was "it's unfortunate". I don't see how it could be fortuate to encounter limits which aren't an inherent property of the medium. This is not specific to this software, but general to any software that provides real value.
I'm not sure why you mention an obligation. You're the only one who uses that word here. Although I could agree that it's a moral obligation not to make the fruits of your work artificially worse than they actually are.
> This is not specific to this software, but general to any software that provides real value.
Value for whom?
Because as noble as the idea of open source is, if something like this is released as open source, the author will make a grand total of jack shit off of it because people will just grab the source and walk away without any kind of compensation to the author. In the real world, open source doesn't pay the bills, and if you make some of value, you should be able to make money off of that, and open source has proven time and again that it is not how people can get paid for their personal projects. (Sponsored software: completely different story. This is not that).
If a artists makes art, we pay them for it. If a carpenter makes furniture, we pay them for it. If an author writes books, we pay them for those. But if a software engineer makes software that has clear value... we lament that it's not free? This a very weird attitude to have towards someone spending their own time and money necessary to make something of value that no one else is going to be making in their stead.
I don't see how this is anything but unfortunate (okay, it's also untrue [krita, RedHat], but bear with me for the sake of the argument).
> we pay them for it. [...] But if a software engineer makes software that has clear value... we lament that it's not free?
Now we're getting somewhere: we lament that it's not free even when we pay them for it. I would rejoice if we paid them to make the software free.