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Comment by jeanlucas | Hacker News Reader

>I don't understand; why do you think it is "sketchy" to try to make a living out of software?

I don't think the original comment meant that it is sketchy to make a living out of software. I think the issue is the posturing as open source, having a github repo with no code just to attract devs and look open source-y and even sharing it on HackerNews right after the issues with closed source by Postman too. Feels like an "open source alternative", but not really, hence the sketchy accusation.

But this is just how I read it.

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> I think the issue is the posturing as open source, having a github repo with no code just to attract devs and look open source-y

As the first paragraph in the README says, we use the GitHub repo to host releases and issues.

Having it on GitHub under the same organization as our other projects that already are open-source is convenient for both us and our users — https://github.com/httpie.

> and even sharing it on HackerNews right after the issues with closed source by Postman too. Feels like an "open source alternative", but not really, hence the sketchy accusation.

The person who shared it is not related to HTTPie.

Given the quality of the discourse here, I almost wish they did not! ;-)

> having a github repo with no code just to attract devs and look open source-y

It's an HTTP client. The client codebase is here:

https://github.com/httpie/cli

Why everyone is getting their knickers in a massive twist because they have an Electron wrapper that they haven't open sourced is mystifying.

I haven't studied the codebase but I highly doubt they are going to have a separate client implementation for the Electron product vs the CLI! They're just trying to create a nice Electron client, in addition to their well-known CLI, and start a business around it aren't they?

We started httpie/desktop as a separate codebase but are working on unifying it with httpie/cli and our cloud to avoid multiple implementations by extracting a shared runtime that will be used everywhere. One of the interesting challenges here is that HTTPie Desktop is written in TypeScript while the rest is in Python.

Thanks, of course, that makes sense. How are you planning on doing it -- use a language like Rust that can easily be called from both and packaged? Or rewrite the CLI in Typescript?

We have a PoC where the runtime is implemented in Python and the Electron and web apps use it through https://pyodide.org/. Still exploring but looks surprisingly viable.

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