As the author of Little Snitch for Linux, I can tell you what drives us: we are a small company where people (not investors) make the decisions. It was a personal choice of mine, driven by a gut feeling. I'm curious about the outcome...
Why is Little Snitch for Linux™ so hard to find from the company homepage[1] and the product page from the legacy app[2]?
Did the fact that you knew it was going to be made partially open source factor into your decision to develop a new, JS-and-DOM-based UI rather than having build targets for a shared, cross-platform codebase? (E.g. so that you wouldn't end up disclosing the source for the proprietary Mac version?)
Why are you using minified dependencies (like uPlot.iife.min.js[1] and uPlot.min.css[2]) for a desktop application?
uPlot is also open source (released by Sorokin under MIT), but why aren't you following the terms of its license[3]?
1. <https://github.com/obdev/littlesnitch-linux/blob/main/webroo...>
2. <https://github.com/obdev/littlesnitch-linux/blob/main/webroo...>
It's somewhat strange that they require the license to be reproduced in every copy, but then offer a download without it. But anyway, I'll prepend the license to the next public release.
Thanks for pointing that out!
Mm... the purpose of minification, when it's not (also) being used for obfuscation purposes, is tied directly to the execution model of Web apps—constraints that don't apply for desktop applications (even if they are implemented in e.g. the same programming language or using the same or a similar runtime).
App makers and browser extension developers who shoehorn all of the (frankly already very bad or at least questionable) "best practices" associated with the tooling that was created to deal with creating/maintaining/delivering SPAs and other browser-based products into applications loaded from disk are just fundamentally not thinking things through.
For a security-sensitive application like this one, where a show of nothing-up-the-sleeve is only a benefit, one should expect there to be _no_ minified blobs in use.
Our site is primarily aimed at Mac users, and most visitors skim rather than read carefully. If the Linux package were more prominent, Mac users would likely click it, struggle to install it, and blame us for the confusion.
And regarding your third question: No. The decision was made when I wanted to run it on our headless servers.
Regarding daemon open source: The future is hard to predict, even more with AI being just invented. I would love to make it open source, but if you can feed it into Claude and tell it to convert it to a Mac version, we could lose our income.
For the moment, we prefer to keep it closed because we cannot estimate the consequences of making it open source.