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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Yes; I missed that. Thank you.

More free software cosplay. :(

> Grist Labs is an open-core company. We offer Grist hosting as a service, with free and paid plans. We also develop and sell features related to Grist using a proprietary license, targeted at the needs of enterprises with large self-managed installations. We see data portability and autonomy as a key value Grist can bring to our users, and grist-core as an essential means to deliver that. We are committed to maintaining and improving the grist-core codebase, and to be thoughtful about how proprietary offerings impact data portability and autonomy.

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I tried the `grist-labs/grist-core` docker install: it's quite easy to set up and most of the useful features are there (I think it's mostly snapshots missing). I don't think "free software cosplay" is totally fair in this case.

And compared to the alternatives (nocodb, mathesar, baserow) they seem to provide the best self-hosted/open source solution in terms of polish and features.

*Edit* I've been looking for a while for a similar software stack for the organisation of a coop I'm a member of, and have not found anything better as of now, though open to alternatives!

Snapshots are there, but you need to configure an s3-like store to enable them, e.g. MinIO (or S3 itself). [Grist employee]

Can confirm that we're self-hosting a couple instances with snapshots enabled (using Scaleway's S3 buckets)

Noted, but can't edit my comment. Thanks!

Free software is an ideology based on respect for the four software freedoms. If you run an organization that sells proprietary software that also releases free software, you demonstrably don’t believe in the fundamental importance of the four software freedoms for users, otherwise you wouldn’t use copyright enforcement mechanisms to deny them to your non-customers.

It’s like a factory that respects human rights for 95% of its employees; such a factory can’t be said to respect human rights.

Microsoft releases a lot of free software, too. This is just a proprietary software vendor that wants to come off as a cool open source company; that’s all open core is: a marketing bullet point. I believe the term “open source cosplay” is appropriate.

If you aren’t faking a personal respect for software freedoms, you consequently release 100% of all software you produce as free software.

It’s okay to be a proprietary software vendor. Not everyone agrees on the four software freedoms being important. It’s just misleading and inconsistent to brand yourself with the ideology, and then not live up to that.

Anyone could attempt to relocate the functionality they add to open- core for free, right? They're producing a fully functional free product and then adding advanced functionality to it for a fee. The human rights analogy doesn't fit.

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