The arguments made here for not open-sourcing the project are completely invalid and leads me to believe that this project will eventually turn into shareware, which then can in turn eventually be sunset along with the possibility of reselling user’s private data down the line. Yes, whatever policies/disclaimers you have now may state you won’t do that. You may also plead with this community that would never do that. However, we (the Internet) have seen these policies change and adapt to do exactly that, and this product would be no exception.
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Safety. There are never any guarantees, and that includes your product not changing its policy to store and sell your user’s private data if you so decide to go get private funding and turn this into a shareware project. I’m sure you can very easily update your policy to start sending data and other stats off from computers with this software installed with the stroke of a policy update and a simple user notice. Let me know if I’m wrong here. Someone saying they would never do this, and someone having the ability to do this are 2 separate issues. Others and I would like to see this code and do our own auditing for peace of mind.
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Repository. This is to respond to #2 and #4. You can create an open-source project on GitHub and lock community pull requests/issues/etc. and just have the code publicly available for anyone to view. A simple disclaimer stating you’re not taking pull requests should suffice. As for not taking issue requests, I’m left in a stupor state as to how to respond. When your users inform you of bugs are just completely ignoring them? If not, then I have no idea how this isn’t the same difference. You also don’t need to write and maintain documentation for a community to contribute since you’re not accepting 3rd party contributions. So the whole argument that this causes the team to slow down development or deal with public issues is just erroneous.
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Longevity. What you said here can apply to your project as well. So I don’t even understand how this is a valid argument for what’s being asked.
All this being said I do like the product. I honestly would be fine with paying a shareware fee to use this software for cloud-like collaboration features and many other things that I can think of which I’m not going to go on mentioning here. However, I (along with many others I’m sure) feel a certain type of way (misleading) that you’re not open-sourcing this project.