Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 163 posts

Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI

#31

Post by dannylmathews »

The license on this project is pretty confusing. The license at the root of the project links to backend/cc/LICENSE.md which says you need a subscription license to use the code.

Can you call it open source if you need a subscription license to run / edit the code?

Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI

#32

Post by hobofan »

panki27 wrote: post #25

What does this do that OpenWebUI (or one of the many of other solutions) does not?

As someone building another competitor in the field, I'll relay some reasons why some of our customers ruled out OpenWebUI in their decision-making process:

- Instability when self-hosting

- Hard to get in touch with sales when looking for SLA-based contracts

- Cluttered product; Multiple concepts seemingly serving the same purpose (e.g. function calling vs. MCP); Most pre-MCP tools suffer from this

- Trouble integrating it with OIDC

- Bad docs that are mostly LLM generated

Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI

#35

Post by csomar »

dannylmathews wrote: post #31

The license on this project is pretty confusing. The license at the root of the project links to backend/cc/LICENSE.md which says you need a subscription license to use the code. Can you call it open source if you need a subscription license to run / edit the code?

Yes. Open source doesn’t mean free.

Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI

#37

Post by Weves »

panki27 wrote: post #25

What does this do that OpenWebUI (or one of the many of other solutions) does not?

Broadly, I think other open source solutions are lacking in (1) integration of external knowledge into the chat (2) simple UX (3) complex "agent" flows.

Both internal RAG and web search are hard to do well, and since we've started as an enterprise search project we've spent a lot of time making it good.

Most (all?) of these projects have UXs that are quite complicated (e.g. exposing front-and-center every model param like Top P without any explanation, no clear distinction between admin/regular user features, etc.). For broader deployments this can overwhelm people who are new to AI tools.

Finally trying to do anything beyond a simple back and forth with a single tool calls isn't great with a lot of these projects. So something like "find me all the open source chat options, understand their strengths/weaknesses, and compile that into a spreadsheet" will work well with Onyx, but not so well with other options (again partially due to our enterprise search roots).

Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI

#39

Post by cjonas »

turblety wrote: post #38

What is it with these Chat apps having strange and not-real open source licenses? OpenWebUI is the same. Is there something about these chat apps that seems to make them more prone to weird and strange licenses? Just opportunist?

Copilotkit is in the same boat. There are parts of the open source codebase that require an enterprise license to use. Basic things like "on error" handlers that are completely offline features. (They might have moved away from this, I haven't checked in a while)

Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI

#40

Post by derleyici »

csomar wrote: post #35
dannylmathews wrote: post #31

The license on this project is pretty confusing. The license at the root of the project links to backend/cc/LICENSE.md which says you need a subscription license to use the code. Can you call it open source if you need a subscription license to run / edit the code?

Yes. Open source doesn’t mean free.

No, they must then state that it is source-available, not open source.
Post reply on HN