Comment by giodamelio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by giodamelio | Hacker News Reader

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It's super important to me. I use Herdr every day and I maintain a whole stack of changes. From minor comfort tweaks that are just preference, to several larger changes like add jj workspace support and a WIP web based view (powered by xterm.js).

This is not the only project like this too. Many of my devtools are piling up changes. I try to upstream changes where it makes sense, but many times they are either very bespoke, or I can't be bothered to do them "right" (for example for the jj workspace change, I just ripped out git support, so I didn't have to futz with syncing the symantics up between the two and config and whatnot).

LLMs have made making personal changes to devtools so effortless that I am now extremely hesitant to use any non source available software at all.

I have been thinking about a possibly expanded market for source available software. I don't really care what the license of the software is, I'm not sharing it at all or using it commercially, so it's kinda a moot point. If someone made some amazing software and sold the source I'd definitely consider it. I know there are all sorts of practical business problems with that, but that aside I'm curious if others feel the same?

> LLMs have made making personal changes to devtools so effortless that I am now extremely hesitant to use any non source available software at all

This mirrors my view so totally it's crazy. If AI is ushering in the era of personal tooling, closing the harness is orthogonal to what users want.

I also don't think closed source is going to work for any software where you can't aggressively prevent the user from introspecting a large chunk of the software, because it's so easy to point an agent at the tool and tell it to copy the functionality you actually care about and/or wrap it.

that is not what orthogonal means

I may be crazy but I've heard and used "orthogonal" in that context. Or I totally misunderstood the original sentence.

Quick googled definition option: "Very different or unrelated; sharply divergent."

THanks! English is not my first language.

"closing the harness is antiparallel to what users want."

> like add jj workspace support

care to share a pr :)

It's not anywhere near making PR ready (and never will be) but here is the branch [1]. I make no promises on it's functionality, and I only periodically rebase Herdr's latest over it. I have been using the jj change for awhile though with no issues. So YMMV.

You can also see the combined output of all my changes at [2], which Jujutsu makes so damn easy via megamerges.

1: https://github.com/giodamelio/herdr/tree/jj-workspace-migrat...

2: https://github.com/giodamelio/herdr/tree/combined-branch

i see your point, in that light what herdr is doing here make sense. keep some part open (e.g. runtime or whatever that means, or the front-end, or the user-facing logic, etc) and move the business-logic/etc to proprietary. So you get to customize the software to meet your needs, and at the same time to create some revenue incentive to grow the company.

alternative is to collect/sell usage data, which is icky, or provide something as a service (token usage, infra, plugins, etc)

Ya, I'm not sure even that would be enough though to be honest.

I am kinda imagining a structure for a theoretical dev tooling business that might be OSS Core, and Source Available additional features. I'm not sure if there is a generally accepted definition of Source Available, but I don't necessarily mean that the source is just out in public on the web. It could be sent to you when you purchase the product, and could maybe even be sold on an upgrade sort of model, where you pay again for the next "big version" of the software, like the good old days of desktop software.

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