Yaak Is Now Open Source

🥳 The Yaak API Client is now open source under the MIT license! github.com/mountain-loop/yaak

I hate to admit it, but the Reddit, HackerNews, and Lobsters folks folks were right. 🙈

Three months ago I published Why Not Open Source as an attempt to explain why the Yaak wouldn’t be open source. Having burnt out maintaining open source in the past, I figured others might find my decision-making process useful, so I shared it to the usual places.

Users of the Yaak’s users mostly agreed, which makes sense as they were already happy with the close-source reality. The broader open-source community, however, strongly disagreed with almost everything I wrote.

• lobste.rs post
• Reddit r/opensource post
• HackerNews post

Here are a few of the highlights:

Don’t conflate “open source”/“free software” with github’s specific social model of drive-by contributions, or even contributions at all… → lobste.rs

But all of those things are also true of closed source software. → ycombinator.com

The claims of this text are complete bullshit. No idea what this “app” is about, anyways. Dont need it. Can go to the trash can of history → reddit.com

While most of the replies weren’t constructive, this 500-word lobste.rs comment is absolute gold. It immediately got me thinking that maybe I was wrong. 🙈

I wanted feedback, and that’s exactly what I got.

My main takeaway was that open source doesn’t mean open contribution. You can still get most of the benefits by simply making the code public:

• Open to security audits
• Transparent functionality (no shady stuff)
• Flexibility (can still fork and modify)
• Runnable even if the developer disappears

I wanted Yaak users to experience these benefits too, which is why Yaak is now open source but closed (mostly) for contribution.

🙈 Open source, closed(ish) contribution

Many commenters pointed to projects like SQLite which are open-source but don’t allow outside contribution. For some reason, I never even considered this as a possibility.

A while later, while searching for more examples of closed-contribution projects, I came across Litestream, which was initially closed to contribution but eventually opened for bug-fixes only.

This model made perfect sense to me, so it’s exactly what I chose to do. Yes, even though I said I’d never open-source… Yaak is now open source under the MIT license and open to contribution for bug fixes only.

Now the desktop Linux users can fix their own bugs (please don’t hate me) 😅

~ Greg