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Comment by achrono | Hacker News Reader

>Is it open-source? No, it is not.

Why not?

As to Why --> this one actually has a decent GUI and one that's not (visibly) based on a locally running webserver -- so it seems like it's got a shot at getting 100x popular with just a YouTube video (or gasp Tiktok). With the popularity of open-source today I find it a little hard to trust that something is "ensuring maximum privacy" as you say without having the open-source badge (yes, I know I shouldn't be so naive, but no, I am not going to look at network level logs to find out if the app is truly contained to local).

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Fair point, but if this was open-source, would you really go and read all of the source code in several programming languages and also audit all of the dependencies?

IMHO, at some point, it's just about trust.

Now, to be 100% honest, I'd love to release this as OSS, but my current business model is based on freemium. And, sell it as white-label for companies.

EDIT: if you have better idea, I'd love to hear about it.

I resent having to step in and say something here, but the way you describe things, I effectively don't exist. I read the app code. I write stdlib code. I grokk every line of every library I use. I share alike.

I'm not saying change your ways, just consider being a bit less flippant when you say things like "IMHO, at some point, it's just about trust". As someone who seeks to profit from this, that's about the worst example you can give a prospective user like me.

My face is hot just having to type this.

Also, FOSS has a lot more chances to have eyes on it. I definitely don't read every line, and i definitely don't expect anyone else to - but i do expect more eyes to be on it, to raise questions, spot interesting behavior, etc. If you see a questionable network IO you can look in the source to investigate, etc.

It has value even if every person doesn't individually read every line.

You're at most a prospective user, never a prospective customer. Developers deserve to get paid for what they create, and those who don't want to pay have no right to make any demands.

Maybe your face is getting hot from trying to shame somebody into giving their work away for free?

Thank you for your kind words, I couldn't say it better.

> IMHO, at some point, it's just about trust

Yes, but you are also literally going to multiply several billions numbers together and pray for a random outcome.

I don't know, maybe some middle ground would be feasible - like have the server-side part open-source, because that's the only part where anything harmful might be (and it's also fairly thin BTW).

But no matter what, the project needs to be profitable for me, sorry to say that, but let's be a bit realistic, you wouldn't work for free either.

>it's just about trust.

Yes, and a big part of establishing trust is sending the right signals. The risk vs reward differential is way higher for open-source compared to closed source, so all other things being equal I would trust open-source more. Note that all other things are actually not equal in this case, e.g. your closest competition is open-source: Ollama, GPT4All, Llamero.

Not really, my closest competition is LM Studio, which is closed-source too. There's also Machato, which is also closed-source (and not even free).

And not updated in quite some time. And very buggy (Machato)

> Fair point, but if this was open-source, would you really go and read all of the source code in several programming languages and also audit all of the dependencies?

This probably isn't the best justification to use on tech forums. Odds are higher here and in similar forums that some of audience do indeed read the source code, do static analysis on them, check the libraries for CVEs, etc.

It is not just about trust.. on an oss project I expect other people to have already read the source code when I can't. People with no incentive to lie or hide whatever they find

Ok, let's try this, if this was (fully) open-source, would you pay $5/month for an access to a premium discord/formus with videos, examples, ability to propose new features or vote on the backlog?

Sidenote, i value FOSS but i'm supportive of your desire to keep it closed and make money.

With that said, i'd never pay $5/m these days for something unless is had very good value to me and obvious ongoing costs i'm using (servers/etc) for the dev/company. Those costs would need to be clear though, not just "we chose to run some servers so that we'd have features which justified subscriptions"

I would however, pay for upgrades - ie the licensing model employed by JetBrains/etc. Which can come out to $5/m (or yearly purchases, etc), or w/e, but most importantly the software keeps working if you decide to cancel.

edit: Also i'm on Linux. Looks like i can't buy it anyway haha

Exactly! I don't want to subscribe to anything, I want to pay once and have the license forever (for that specific version + bugfixes).

But that makes OSS more complicated - people usually don't pay for something they can clone & build themselves.

BTW: Linux and Windows will definitely happen, I just didn't have time yet. Sorry, it's a lot of work and time so I had to pick macos first, and even that alone is a lot of testing on different configurations.

I will say, as someone who values FOSS - if you see areas in your app that don't feel super proprietary and that you can library-out - that puts forward good will to people like me.

Ideally your app would be all FOSS components and i pay for the glue to tie it all together, but i've seen that become too easy to knock-off. Depends on the app of course. Still, FOSSing parts can do a fair amount of good will to the FOSS crowd, imo.

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