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Comment by jFriedensreich | Hacker News Reader

I had to dig hard to find this is a SAAS sandbox offering not an actual sandbox (the software i can use locally). Its just wasting peoples time, no one needs a non opensource sandbox. There are now at least 3 apache 2 projects (smolmachines, microsandbox, boxlite) working on sandboxes and at least one of them should be ready for primetime soon.

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It's interesting to see this one launch (yes yet another sandbox.. I was getting worried we'd not seen one for a few days)

SlicerVM (est. 2022) is already used for prime time, not "free as in beer" but has pretty reasonable individual plans that include all features. Shares the core code with actuated. (Creator of both speaking here)

Feel free to take a look and see if gives you a little more than the others you mentioned. If not no problems, I realise some folks prefer free stuff.

What do you mean "not free as in beer"? Its not free as in anything? Sandboxes need to be open source, nothing else is acceptable.

Why should they be open source?

Same reason linux or databases need to be open source. A sandbox is not a nice to have or a feature anymore, it is as fundamental building block to running any software. You cannot depend on closed source building blocks, not as closed source product and especially not as open source product.

I'm a happy smolmachines user. It has some rough edges but it works really great. I haven't tested microsandbox and boxlite, and maybe they consume OCI images too, but smolmachines is a winner because of that.

It’s like saying no one needs Dropbox because rsync exists, or no one needs HubSpot because Salesforce exists.

Not really, its more like saying no one needs another windows when linux exists. By "no one needs" i mean the world needs open source sandbox building blocks that are up to the challenges of the current age, no closed source solution can be a fundamental building block for the world to become better and more secure. No non-local building block can be at the foundation to anything that makes the world better and more robust.

That's a very narrow and technical person's point of view.

You might need it open source, the majority of the world doesn't care, like they don't care Windows is closed source, or like AWS is a "cloud" running somewhere else. Both of them are building blocks that made "the world better and more robust".

Users might not care but the people building such things (us) do care and must care so that we can provide a product for those users which does what it says.

If you don't care that's fine. You go run the Claude Code "sandbox" and let it put your entire home directory on a public pastebin. Anthropic guarantee it will exfiltrate your data in the most secure way possible.

The rest of us want verifiable sandboxes which we can fix if they are wrong.

No, it's like saying almost no one wants a saaszsh. Which is probably an accurate statement.

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