Comment by yusina | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yusina | Hacker News Reader

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First of all, great tool!

> trust

That's exactly right. The main attractiveness of your tool comes from the "never leaves your browser", insinuating that other similar services do send your data to a server and then who-knows has access to your sensitive data. I really like that angle. But we don't know you. We can use some tools to check that nothing is transmitted today. But who knows about the future? Maybe you change your mind? Maybe once your service becomes popular you sell it for $$$ and the new owner silently pushes things to a server "totally securely, we promise"? Or is even malicious?

> anyone can see the html/javascript

Seeing minified javascript is not the same as open source. Nobody would claim that the google doc UI is "open source".

If you open source this and it turns out as great as it seems then it can make you world famous. If you keep it closed then it will probably disappear in the vast sea of similar sevices, server-based or not (since avg Joe doesn't know the difference and doesn't care). It's your choice to make.

> Though, maybe I'll add something where you can pay to get the desktop version

Ah, thanks for your honesty here. An angle describing your project in a more bad-faith way could now be that you run beta-testing of your proprietay software through this "free" service and intend to turn it into a closed pay product once the public testing has fleshed out the main issues. That's obviously something you are free to do instead of an open source product emphasizing freedom.

Thanks!

> trust All fair points that you're making. I see no reason I would change my mind to send PDFs to the server, but I understand your concerns. If I'm reading in between the lines of what you're saying, that the way to alleviate these concerns is to make it open source?

I think that's a compelling argument, but to play devil's advocate if most people realistically working with PDFs aren't developers and thus wouldn't go to GitHub to host it themselves, then what would change for them to have a self-hostable option? If I released a desktop version, might the average person would see that as "private" and have any privacy concerns relieved, whether it was open sourced or not?

There is always a degree of trust you put in any company's software you use, and it's up to the company to be good stewards of that trust. If they break it, it's always bad for business anyways. But there is a point that if it was open source, those who have the desire to do so can continue using it without any concerns, which is fair.

> anyone can see the html/javascript Yes minified javascript is not the same as open source, but mine is not minified. Plain HTML, CSS and vanilla JS. So given that and since all the editing happens in the browser, the entire source code is inspectable for anyone who wants to see.

Given that the average person editing PDFs is not tech savvy, and as you said they don't really know the difference between software options, then given that what do you see as the utility of open-sourcing, from a business or even public good perspective? Genuine question.

> Though, maybe I'll add something where you can pay to get the desktop version I can see why someone would think that, but really at this point I'm figuring out what/if there is a monetization method here, and I'm not set on a particular path. I don't have any agenda to just make it free then close it off. That'd probably be a bad business decision anyways. I'm not sure if desktop is something to charge for, or if desktop and the whole thing is better to be free and open-source along with premium features that people can optionally pay for that are outside the core scope. I'm still thinking through it.

Ideally, I'll make all core features open-source while there are also some extra features people are willing to pay for. I'm just still wrestling with even just from the public good perspective, for the vast majority of people that won't host it themselves how would they benefit from open-source versus the core features just being free?

Curious if you have any response to what I've laid out here.

Appreciate your thoughtfulness!! You've given me a lot to think about.

Open sourcing a piece of software, especially one that focuses on a broader audience like yours, can convince more people than just developers. The advantages of open source are well-known even among less techy people who aren't necessarily interested in self-hosting the application. It's a good way to quickly earn the trust of people who are initially sceptical of your product.

It shows to your potential users that, even if they decided not to trust the developer anymore in the future, they will likely still be able to use your application. Everyone praised Simple Mobile Tools until the developer sold it to an ad company. But because it was open source, people were able to fork the entire suite of apps to continue using them.

There's also a lot of growth potential. draw.io likely wouldn't be integrated into so many other products if it wasn't open source. It allows them to charge money (apparently) for specific integrations, simply because everyone is already familiar with the product.

Typst is another good example. Their compiler is free and open source, but the web app is not. Certain features of their web app require a subscription, which allows them to pay the bills. But I (and many other people) wouldn't be using and recommending it if the core wasn't open source, because if Typst ever disappears, I still want to be able to compile my documents. Currently this might not matter much for your app since PDF is a universal format anyway, but as you flesh out your product, it will become more important.

It's difficult to monetise open source software, but so much more rewarding if it does work out. And your app being targeted at the general public gives you a massive advantage, since the potential market is so much larger.

>There is always a degree of trust you put in any company's software you use, and it's up to the company to be good stewards of that trust. If they break it, it's always bad for business anyways. But there is a point that if it was open source, those who have the desire to do so can continue using it without any concerns, which is fair.

I generally agree, but in this case you don't even have any meaningful identification on the site to say who created the software. I'm not sure how one can trust the creator of software if they won't even tell you who or what they are. Not even a pseudonym. There is no way to say that the person posting as philjohnson here is in fact the creator, or if the claimed copyright owner "Breeze PDF" is a legal entity that can own copyright.

As it is, with no source or identifying information, my default assumption if I happened upon this page would be that is is another one of the thousands of sites running FOSS software as a service with no added value or contribution back, but possibly also scanning every PDF it sees for bank/personal/tax/crypto information at which point it would decide to send that off to a server.

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