[blagie]

The language is very, very nice.

However, if I ran into this incidentally (not posted to HN for review), I would never use this. I'd see the lack of a github link on the top right, and assume it's a some kind of startup making some prototype hosted tool.

The only way to find out this is open-source is to click "about," read to the third paragraph, see github mentioned, click through the link, and click on the license.

My major piece of feedback is to add a github link to the icons at the top-right of the page. A .org might also be nicer than a .com.

To people asking why this and not a graphical tool?

To me, the overhead to moving a graphical tool is very large:

1) I like being able to manage files on github and be able to use common tooling.

2) If someone (including myself, two years later) needs to install Vizio, Illustrator, or whatever other tool to edit my diagrams, pay for a cloud service, or worse, recover something which was hosted in a discontinued tool, I'm SOL.

3) Discovery is big too. I can use normal search tools to find things. If something is locked away in a .ai file, a .docx file, or a cloud service, and I lose it, it's likely lost forever.

95% of the cost of most projects is maintenance, and even if I invest 10x the time up-front into making a diagram in a tool like this (e.g. an hour to learn it, tweak it, and get the diagram I want, instead of 5 minutes in my favourite GUI), that will pay much than an hour in dividends down the line. I use Markdown, LaTeX, and similar for large or important documents because, in the long term, they save time.

[scbrg]

> However, if I ran into this incidentally (not posted to HN for review), I would never use this. I'd see the lack of a github link on the top right, and assume it's a some kind of startup making some prototype hosted tool.

Yeah, it's absolutely horrible when the GitHub link is in the bottom right rather than the top right. Completely unforgivable. Geez.

Do (Free|Net|Open)BSD and GNU tools qualify as open source? No GitHub link as far as the eye can see :)

[blagie]

What's in the bottom right is still not the same. Plenty of projects use github issues for issue tracking without being open-source. This links to the github issues. It's still three clicks to find out it's open-source. In addition, the upside of following standard patterns is pretty well-established. Most of us are tuned to ignore pop-overs.

Ways I've seen this done:

- Clear github icon (visual cue)

- "Fork us on github" template

- Adding the words "open-source" somewhere (or even XXX-licensed). The "about" page could start "An open-source tool for drawing UML diagrams based on a simple syntax."

There's no reason to go over-the-top. Again, the reason people post things to HN is generally to generate visibility and to gain feedback. People don't write feedback to be mean but to help projects improve.

It's not "completely unforgivable" but I gave a bit of simple feedback which might reduce friction a bit and which would take a few minutes to implement. I appreciate similar feedback on my projects. In this case, for me (n=1), I've been derailed from adopting projects based on similar levels of friction. I will pull up a many things, prune them pretty quickly, and then do a deep dive into the most promising. I've always found user studies and friendly reviews helpful for avoiding these sorts of frictions in my own work.

[darkwater]

I think that the main complaint was a lack of prominence to what the thing actually is, and its license.

[f1shy]

Was only a feedback.

[dizhn]

Nowadays even with a GitHub link or claims of being open source you have to go check the repository to see what license they actually have and what percentage of the source is actually there. Some repos even have only binaries and some have the source for the open source projects they use.

There's actually another category. Open source software with paid plugins. I always wonder what happens when someone adds similar functionality to the open source version.

[ahartmetz]

I dunno, is it even still ...allowed... to have Free / Open Source software that does not live on GitHub? Because that exists. Though admittedly it's usually mirrored on GitHub.

[hoosieree]

If you're not freely donating your time and energy to improving the proprietary dataset that powers Copilot, can you even call yourself Open Source?

[carapace]

It's truly astonishing and disheartening how completely MS has routed the Free and Open Source movement. (Even before you get to Copilot.)