[arpit]

There was an interesting point during Notable's development when the project went from an open source one to closed source [1]. While I get open source developers should be paid for the work, I am not sure how I feel about OSS projects getting some attention and then closing source

[1] https://github.com/notable/notable/issues/432

[fabiospampinato]

Author here, I realize how from the user perspective if the app stayed open-source and I still kept working on it full-time that would have been better, but that scenario is unrealistic, I just couldn't justify to myself working on it full-time without getting any revenue out of it and releasing everything as open-source, and I've been working on it for about 18 months now.

If somebody else can justify that proposition to themselves they are more than welcome to fork the app from the last available open-source version and take the open-source path.

Open-sourcing it again is not out of the table, but I need to make the project financially sustainable before considering this.

By the way a lot of the interesting libraries used inside the app are released as open-source still, mostly under my profile: https://github.com/fabiospampinato?tab=repositories&type=sou...

[AlchemistCamp]

Has the open source branch of the project stopped entirely or is it more of the "open source core" approach used by Sidekiq and others?

How do you think about the growth/monetization trade-offs?

[fabiospampinato]

> Has the open source branch of the project stopped entirely or is it more of the "open source core" approach used by Sidekiq and others?

No further commits. However most of the core libraries I wrote for it are open-source, so in some sense it's not entirely closed.

> How do you think about the growth/monetization trade-offs?

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by that.

[theobr]

All of this said, I've recently found Foam hard to beat. Awesome markdown "thought web" experience built right into VSCode. Refreshing approach after years of mediocre Electron apps

https://github.com/foambubble/foam

[djeiasbsbo]

I use this too but have already extended it a lot. What I don't really understand is what the Foam extension itself does (I think nothing yet?!).

I'm not interested in publishing so I instead focused on adding extensions for things like tags (to get closer to the Zettelkasten principle) and more features like graphs (e.g. using mermaid). I would recommend installing 'Markdown Preview Enhanced' to really improve the experience.

[dcsan]

2nd for FOAM. Its really awesome. this VSCode as a platform is taking off. There are other markdown renderers like dotgraph that can easily be embedded in your visuals using other extensions. And then all the power of VScode editing on top. It's a shame for obsidian tho...

I also like Typora as a markdown editor. Nice in-page editing. Obsidian is good for a project overview, with the map (graph) view but it's not that great as a single-page editor tool.

[fabiospampinato]

Author here, commenting on the "I am not sure how I feel about OSS projects getting some attention and then closing source" part of your message.

I think that sounds sketchy to some people, but hear me out:

1. I couldn't stand using Evernote anymore, I couldn't find a Markdown-based alternative that I really liked, I thought I would make one for myself.

2. After the app was "done", at least enough for it to be usable for me, I released it on GitHub, essentially because open-source is my default, and shared it on the internet.

3. The app got a bit of traction and I thought I would continue working on it maybe for a bit longer.

4. At some point months of my time had been put into it, and many more months were needed before the app could start to generate some revenue (I'm ~18 months in now, and no revenue yet), so I couldn't justify releasing all the code anymore, but I still wanted to improve the app.

At this point in the story what would you do? I saw the following options:

1. Abandon Notable and move onto other projects. But why would I do that? I like working on it, and people seem to like it.

2. Rename Notable into something else and make another repo. I think this would have been considered the "fairer" option for some people here, but if you think about it it doesn't really make sense: Notable-open would still receive no further open-source commits, I would have to ask all my existing users to move to another app for some reason (breaking automatic updates), and frankly I would even need to find a new name, which I had made a logo for, bought the "notable.md" domain and registered a bunch of online accounts with that name already.

3. Releasing the code with a more restrictive license, but I don't really believe in licenses, like a license to me is not a law of nature that fundamentally forbids people from copying the entire app, making a few tweaks, and selling a competing product out of that, it just means that if I'm convinced somebody has done that, and there are laws in his/her country, and if I sue him/her, then probably I will win. For a project that has net me a negative income essentially in opportunity cost, so far at least, why would I go for that trouble?

4. The path that I ended up taking.

Do you people see any other options? Do you have any strong arguments for why I should have taken another path?

Slight rant: I'd be much more impressed if the people strongly criticizing how I spent my time, largely solely to the benefit of Notable's users and the open-source community as a whole (almost all core components of the app are standalone libraries I'm open-sourcing fully), had taken the path they are advocating for themselves.