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by misnome 410 days ago
“Pricing”, “Sign Up”

Ah yes, this definitely is the “Modern” approach.

There does seem to be an open source, non-SAAS part, but information about it looks pretty deliberately buried.

5 comments

Well everyone likes free software (as in freedom and beer) but 0 of you pay, while on a 6 figure salary. Meanwhile no hesitation to pay AWS, Netflix, Amazon, etc. all of them net negative contributors to free software.

So... yeah.

> 0 of you pay

That is an overly broad generalization.

> no hesitation to pay AWS, Netflix, Amazon, etc.

Again, an overly broad generalization.

I am unsure what kind of conclusion you can objectively make out of such generic statements.

Absolutely agree! Money only becomes an issue when someone asks for it politely. And then people ask why such efforts and projects die in the shadows.
They are a very small team and this is a known issue - there is a website refresh coming up that will fix it

They developed the main face of the product first - the online webapp which has live collaboration - which sounds like a sane choice for a new company.

> sounds like a sane choice for a new company.

It does, but this is actually part of the critique. Typst is developed by a company, while LaTeX is not.

Why is that a bad thing, though? To me this actually sounds a net positive for two reasons: first, there's a single coherent overarching design, and second, so long as their business model is sustainable, it means that the product won't suddenly disappear because of maintainer burnout etc.
Yeah, today's open source combines the worst from corporate jobs and social media. Typst looks nice though, but is indeed developed in a logic of a business
Almost all of typst, except their web app, is available on crates.io and from many Linux distribution repositories. And you can skip the web app if you don't prefer it. There's no loss of functionality.
To be fair - there is a big "View on Github" button on the very first page
I find today much easier to contribute to (in the open source sense) than latex. Go to the GitHub and interact with the developers. Who happen to be very responsive.

I used latex for 20+ years and don't know how to file a bug for latex. Do I do it for xelatex, latex? Where? How do I update things? Download 4 gigs? Where's to documentation? Where's a book that explains how to contribute to latex? These are some of the issues I've dealt with and am happy to never have to again.