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Cal.com is going closed source

cal.com

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Re: Cal.com is going closed source

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going closed source is making the branch secret/private, not making it obscure. Obscurity would be zipping up the open source code (without a password) and leaving it online. Obscurity is just called taking additional steps to recover the information. Your passwords are not obscure strings of characters, they are secrets.

If there is a self-hosted version at all, then the compiled form is out there to be analysed. While compilation and other forms of code transformation that may occur are not 1->1, trivially reversed, operations, they are much closer to bad password security (symmetric encryption or worse) then good (proper hashing with salting/peppering/etc). Heck, depending on the languages/frameworks/other used the code may be hard…

Fully agree. But cal.com is SaaS-only, after they move to closed-source, there will be nothing to download.

Re: Cal.com is going closed source

#153
post #121
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding a vulnerability in a black box is drastically different from finding one in a white box. This isn’t about whether there is a vulnerability or not, but about the likelihood of it being found.

No it isn't. There is a tooling gap, and there is a skill gap, but both of those are being rapidly closed by both open and closed source projects. LLMs, and tools built to use them, are violating a lot of assumptions these days.

It's a meaningful difference for SaaS. Most likely an attacker doesn't have access to your running binary let alone source code, and if they probe it like a pentester would it will be noisy and blocked/flagged by your WAF.

Re: Cal.com is going closed source

#154
post #11

Drew Breunig published a very relevant piece yesterday that came to the opposite conclusion: https://www.dbreunig.com/2026/04/14/cybersecurity-is-proof-o... Since security exploits can now be found by spending tokens, open source is MORE valuable because open source libraries can share that auditing budget while closed source software has to find all the exploits themselves in private. > If Mythos continues to find e…

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Re: Cal.com is going closed source

#156
this is a big nothing. they relicensed the previous cal.com as cal.diy (MIT by the way, instead AGPL or something else) and effectively forked their own product into the "new" cal.com. anyone who cares would just use cal.diy as they were prior to this announcement with cal.com

Re: Cal.com is going closed source

#157

this is a big nothing. they relicensed the previous cal.com as cal.diy (MIT by the way, instead AGPL or something else) and effectively forked their own product into the "new" cal.com. anyone who cares would just use cal.diy as they were prior to this announcement with cal.com

We’d hope but they could neuter Cal.diy over time. From their chart between the differences of cal.diy and cal.com, teams are not supported. I’m self hosting Cal.com and I think I do have access to teams as of right now.

Re: Cal.com is going closed source

#159
Enshittification has come for VC backed open-source. AI has deemed commercial open source obsolete especially when users can point Calude Code to calcom on GitHub and ask it to make them scheduling features directly into their product. That’s what spooked Cal.

Re: Cal.com is going closed source

#160
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling the real reason is them trying to avoid someone using AI to copyright-wash their product, they're just using security as the excuse.

An app like Cal.com can be vibe coded in a few evenings with a Chrome MCP server pointed to their website to figure out all the nooks and crannys. The moat of Cal.com is not the code, it's the users who don't want to migrate. The real answer is they are likely having a hard time converting people to paid plans

Coding something vs maintaining it can be quite different things.
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