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Comment by gbjcantab | Hacker News Reader

This looks reasonably interesting, and Evan is extremely thoughtful about design; I know he’s put a huge amount of work into this.

Personally, I’d be very cautious about adopting closed-source software with such a restrictive license as part of an application, especially given the context of Elm’s trajectory. When Elm went through breaking changes or regressions, or was not worked on publicly for years, users had access to the source and the right to modify it. With Acadia’s licensing, you’d be stranded.

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On the other hand, with Elm there was no correlation between adoption and funding for development. With Acadia, he's trying a different funding model, so that might mean better support for both Acadia and Elm.

The Elm project forked into a bunch of different Elms because Evan basically abandoned / killed it. Then he got more interested with this project. What’s to say that won’t happen again?

I think it's fair to say there are other ways to interpret what happened with Elm. What if Evan stopped working on it because he needed to make a living and working on Elm wasn't going to achieve that? In that case, if working on Acadia will earn him a a living, it seems reasonable to believe he will keep working on it.

> So even if “open core” is a strictly better model, we lack the intuition and experience to feel confident starting there. By thinking of Elm as the “open core” at first, we give ourselves time to learn and flexibility to expand the core later.

https://acadia.engineering/license/faq

The way I read this, Acadia is an attempt to finance working on both it and Elm.

That is fair but I think that there’s not a clear thing from Evan we can point to which explains it contributes to the uncertainty in this new project. Makes me feel we should be wary of a repeat. If anything it seems what he learned from his experience with Elm is that the project should not have been open, and his main problem seemed to be community relations. Evan’s reputation precedes him so I’m sure Acadia will be a brilliant technical artifact, but I wouldn’t get burned twice trying to be a member of that community or contributing to it technically.

Do you nurse a personal grudge?

No, I don't know Evan and have never personally interacted with him. I'm wary of BDFLs because you can invest in a tool and then that time and energy is wasted if the wind changes.

"Stop" is no longer the right word. Elm had a release on July 6th. The counter has reset.

None of the forks really have the same design goals as Elm though, so if you're compiling Elm code into JS you're probably using the Elm 0.19.2 compiler, not a fork.

- There's an outside chance you're doing Zokka to allow for custom package repos (I think that's the only difference).

- You may be using the Lamdera compiler to use Set and Dict natively with your custom types.

If you're doing something other than compile Elm to JS for UIs, you may in fact be using one of the actual forks.

I would make the larger point that I do not like my software to depend on any software with a bus factor of one that I can't control. Elm had this problem and Acadia has it too.

The bus factor for Elm is currently 2, since Tereza (his Wife) works on both Elm and Acadia.

Unless they make a point to always travel separately, this seems more like a variable bus factor between 1 and 2, just as the Presidency of the United States has a much lower bus factor during the State of the Union address.

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