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

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51–60 of 163 posts

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

#51
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's like so long ago. But yeah, good luck competing with ChatGPT.

There are many markets (Europe), and highly regulated industries with air-gapped deployments where the typical players (ChatGPT, MS Copilot) in the field are having a hard time. On another axis, if you are able to offer BYOK deployments and the customers have huge staff with low usage, it's pretty easy to compete with the big players due to their high per-seat pricing.

There are also many teams we work with that want to (1) retain model flexibility and (2) give everyone at the company the best model for the job. Every week? a model from a different provider comes out that is better at some tasks than anyone else. It's not great to be locked out from using that model since you're a "ChatGPT" company.

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

#52

Honestly surprised something like this can get funded

My understanding of YC is that they place more emphasis on the founders than the initial idea, and teams often pivot.

That being said, I think there is an opportunity for them to discover and serve an important enterprise use case as AI in enterprise hits exponential growth.

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

#53
post #41
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Open source doesn’t mean free.

It really does, by any definition I've ever heard. I suppose the authoritative one would be [1]. A common "trick" for commercial open source software is to use a copyleft license, which restricts redistribution as part of commercial products, and to offer a paid license to get around that. [1]: https://opensource.org/osd

GNU disagrees.

> Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.

> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

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

#55
post #43

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?

You don't need any subscription to run the code! By default, none of the enterprise code runs (and it can all be completely removed and the app will work as expected). Fully FOSS version here: https://github.com/onyx-dot-app/onyx-foss .

that's fair. What does the enterprise code do vs the FOSS?

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

#56
post #21

> We’re building an open-source chat that works As long as you have Pricing on your website your product is not open source in the true spirit of open sourceness. It is open code for sure but it is a business and so incentive is to run it like a business which will conflate with how the project is used by the community. Btw, there is nothing wrong with that but let's be honest here if you get this funded (perhaps it…

Great to hear that you've heard good things. And yea we have many large (>1k+) teams using just the open-source version (something we love to see).

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

#60

Sorry, but why use this over oobabooga/sillytavern? Why do we have to yet again poorly copy an oversimplified UI? The value of local models comes from their huge amount of settings/control that they offer. Why must we throw that all away? Yet again, the world waits for good UI/UX for pro/prosumers with AI systems. No one is learning from ComfyUI, Automatic1111, or SillyTavern. No, LM-Studio is not actually prosumer

We're definitely looking to add back some of that flexibility / customizability. I don't think you have to sacrifice a nice, simple UI to provide what power users are looking for.

For now, the main reasons for a prosumer to use over oobabooga/sillytavern are around the base tool set we provide and the "agent loop". If you ever want to use your single chat interface to do data analysis (code interpreter), multi-step realtime research (deep research), or RAG over large scale data (hybrid search), Onyx would be a particularly good choice.

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