> closed source (despite their website proudly claiming "Open source")
HTTPie CLI has been open-source for a decade. HTTPie Desktop has yet to be open-sourced. We first want to get the product, architecture, and codebase somewhat stable. As the README says, we use the GitHub repo to host releases and issues.
> You gave this exact same answer to me in your Discord a year ago. If nothing sketchy is going on why not just open source the thing?
We appreciate your interest, but we never gave an ETA. I do regret having made the intention public, though.
> At a minimum you should remove the banner at the bottom of the page claiming it's open source.
That’s a good point. As I wrote in another comment below: I’ve now updated the website template not to show the image with the slogan on this page. Thanks for the feedback.
Good on you for altering the page. I very much hope to see the desktop client become open source soon, as I would very much like to use it. Best of luck with the project.
I don't understand; why do you think it is "sketchy" to try to make a living out of software?
(For reference, I work as a software engineer and am also the author of a popular open source project which I give away for free and have put thousands of hours into.)
>I don't understand; why do you think it is "sketchy" to try to make a living out of software?
I don't think the original comment meant that it is sketchy to make a living out of software. I think the issue is the posturing as open source, having a github repo with no code just to attract devs and look open source-y and even sharing it on HackerNews right after the issues with closed source by Postman too. Feels like an "open source alternative", but not really, hence the sketchy accusation.
> I think the issue is the posturing as open source, having a github repo with no code just to attract devs and look open source-y
As the first paragraph in the README says, we use the GitHub repo to host releases and issues.
Having it on GitHub under the same organization as our other projects that already are open-source is convenient for both us and our users — https://github.com/httpie.
> and even sharing it on HackerNews right after the issues with closed source by Postman too. Feels like an "open source alternative", but not really, hence the sketchy accusation.
The person who shared it is not related to HTTPie.
Given the quality of the discourse here, I almost wish they did not! ;-)
Why everyone is getting their knickers in a massive twist because they have an Electron wrapper that they haven't open sourced is mystifying.
I haven't studied the codebase but I highly doubt they are going to have a separate client implementation for the Electron product vs the CLI! They're just trying to create a nice Electron client, in addition to their well-known CLI, and start a business around it aren't they?
We started httpie/desktop as a separate codebase but are working on unifying it with httpie/cli and our cloud to avoid multiple implementations by extracting a shared runtime that will be used everywhere. One of the interesting challenges here is that HTTPie Desktop is written in TypeScript while the rest is in Python.
For creating requests the GUI of postman is way over the top. HTTP is so simple, why not just write that directly in a literate format you can checkin to a repo? For actually running the requests though I agree a gui is nice. I actually use dot-http as an embedded tool in a browser extension. They're still alternatives, just not in the style you're used to.
So is email. The simplicity of a protocol has nothing to do with the complexity of the workflow that produces it.
> why not just write that directly in a literate format you can checkin to a repo?
Because nothing I work on in Postman is something I need to check in to a repo. I need to test HTTP requests, and I've never worked with a code base that had raw HTTP requests in it.
> They're still alternatives, just not in the style you're used to.
The "style" is different enough that entire use cases become impossible.
Let's say I want to copy HTTP response headers out of a log in JSON format. In Postman, I can paste JSON (and various other key-value formats) into the headers field, and it automatically parses it for me.
There are a hundred little conveniences like that that require a good GUI.
HTTPie CLI has been open-source for a decade. HTTPie Desktop has yet to be open-sourced. We first want to get the product, architecture, and codebase somewhat stable. As the README says, we use the GitHub repo to host releases and issues.