hope they release a notarised version of the app for it to work on macOS Catalina
Right click (or control click) the app, click open, then click open in the dialogue box.
Sourcetrail, interactive source explorer, is now free and open-source
41–50 of 55 posts
Re: Sourcetrail, interactive source explorer, is now free and open-source
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's with open source but not free software What do you mean?
The source is available (open), but there are restrictions in what you can use the source and software for - in this case, no commercial development is explicitly stated. Is this way while it is open and gratis (for some uses), it is not libre. Additionally, creative commons do not recommend their license for source code and software works because software has specific needs that cc was not developed with in mind.
So, it's source-available, not Open Source.
Re: Sourcetrail, interactive source explorer, is now free and open-source
#43This going open source is just wonderful, but I have a feeling this is going to significantly decrease lower the company's revenue and ultimately hurt the product.
So here's my question: how do we avoid that? Outside of freelancers who control their finances directly, most developers probably won't be able to convince their company's money people to pay for something they can get for free. Paying a relatively low annual license can usually be justified for the sake of efficiency, but "donate to the devs to keep the project going" is a much tougher sell.
My only idea is selling a "subscription" to signed binary builds under a non-free license, but I'm not sure that would work very well either...
Re: Sourcetrail, interactive source explorer, is now free and open-source
#44I've been following sourcetrail since the author did his cppcon talk. It does the job well - I remember loading Wolfenstein 3D into sourcetrail and watching the call graph explode from a single point of MAIN into a massive menorah of calls, all winding back to a circular buffer, and finally a single point of FREE. It was beautiful, and it's bittersweet to see the author go the open source route. I had high hopes for…
Can you provide a link to the talk? I tried searching on mobile and failed. Will try again later today and post it here if I manage to find it.
C++Now 2018: Eberhard Gräther “The Untapped Potential of Software Visualization”
Re: Sourcetrail, interactive source explorer, is now free and open-source
#45This going open source is just wonderful, but I have a feeling this is going to significantly decrease lower the company's revenue and ultimately hurt the product. So here's my question: how do we avoid that? Outside of freelancers who control their finances directly, most developers probably won't be able to convince their company's money people to pay for something they can get for free. Paying a relatively low ann…
I'm a little disappointed that they've gone down this road - I don't think donations is a good model for most open-source tools.
I'm building & selling a 100% open-source product myself (https://httptoolkit.tech) funded by a paid but still open-source premium tier, and I also have a popular open source library (https://github.com/pimterry/loglevel) funded by donations via tidelift: https://tidelift.com/subscription/pkg/npm-loglevel.
So far, with far fewer users, the paid tier is a _dramatically_ more effective option: it makes nearly $1000 a month, and increasing, while donations make $50 a month. The latter library is a small package, but it is a small package that's installed 6 million times a week, so there's a huge volume of software depending on this. The former app has a few thousand monthly users but similarly isn't something that your whole business is typically going to revolve around, it's just a useful tool.
Imo, unless you're huge or you're going to become a really fundamental part of people's business, donations aren't going to work. Small libraries or occasional-use tools just won't get there. If you're webpack it's great, and I do think it's super valuable for those cases, but most projects aren't webpack.
However for almost any tool you can separate the power user/enterprise features from the basic features, and then put the former behind a simple paywall. It can remain open source, so the determined can fork the whole project and remove the paywall easily if they prefer, but for any large organisation that doesn't really make sense from a time or ongoing cost perspective, and you either miss out on all future development, or you have constant work to merge upstream changes with yours. Alternatively, you pay $10 a month and the problem goes away.
So far so good, and it feels like a win-win. Hard to translate to libraries I think, but there's interesting developments here like https://gitroyalty.com/.
Re: Sourcetrail, interactive source explorer, is now free and open-source
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
The source is available (open), but there are restrictions in what you can use the source and software for - in this case, no commercial development is explicitly stated. Is this way while it is open and gratis (for some uses), it is not libre. Additionally, creative commons do not recommend their license for source code and software works because software has specific needs that cc was not developed with in mind.
So, it's source-available, not Open Source.
If you say so...
Re: Sourcetrail, interactive source explorer, is now free and open-source
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's with open source but not free software What do you mean?
Open source does not have to be free. For example, you buy the software and with it you also get the source code.
The most common definition of "open source" is pretty much indistinguishable from free software. The only real difference is the overall goal of the two movements. The term open source comes from the OSI: https://opensource.org/ The definition of "open source" is here: https://opensource.org/osd Before the OSI nobody used the term "open source". It was coined by Eric Raymond (ESR). I can't think of any way it would be correct to use the term in a different context.
Re: Sourcetrail, interactive source explorer, is now free and open-source
#48This going open source is just wonderful, but I have a feeling this is going to significantly decrease lower the company's revenue and ultimately hurt the product. So here's my question: how do we avoid that? Outside of freelancers who control their finances directly, most developers probably won't be able to convince their company's money people to pay for something they can get for free. Paying a relatively low ann…
I'm a little disappointed that they've gone down this road - I don't think donations is a good model for most open-source tools. I'm building & selling a 100% open-source product myself ( https://httptoolkit.tech ) funded by a paid but still open-source premium tier, and I also have a popular open source library ( https://github.com/pimterry/loglevel ) funded by donations via tidelift: https://tidelift.com/subscripti…
Did you guys read the same blog post I did?
It sounded to me like they weren't able to get enough revenue going for their work, and are basically throwing in the towel.
To me, it sounded as if they're hoping that their audience increases to a degree that the donations will finally be able to make their livelihood sustainable... Or not, which will make this a side gig
Re: Sourcetrail, interactive source explorer, is now free and open-source
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a little disappointed that they've gone down this road - I don't think donations is a good model for most open-source tools. I'm building & selling a 100% open-source product myself ( https://httptoolkit.tech ) funded by a paid but still open-source premium tier, and I also have a popular open source library ( https://github.com/pimterry/loglevel ) funded by donations via tidelift: https://tidelift.com/subscripti…
Did you guys read the same blog post I did? It sounded to me like they weren't able to get enough revenue going for their work, and are basically throwing in the towel. To me, it sounded as if they're hoping that their audience increases to a degree that the donations will finally be able to make their livelihood sustainable... Or not, which will make this a side gig
> It sounded to me like they weren't able to get enough revenue going for their work, and are basically throwing in the towel.
I sort-of agree. I don't think they're throwing in the towel completely, but clearly their current model isn't working, and they need to try something else, and they know that that might not work either.
Nonetheless: they want an alternative model that might make this sustainable, and I suspect they'd have better luck trying an open-source with a paid tier model, rather than pure donations.
I've never used the Sourcetrail, but I suspect there are some simpler and more advanced features involved. They could open source it as here, but put the advanced features behind a simple paywall. That would still give the benefits of open sourcing (more community engagement, wider usage of the tool itself) whilst being far more likely to drive the heavy/enterprise users to actually pay for it. Asking people nicely for donations is much less effective than asking for money to use a valuable feature.
Re: Sourcetrail, interactive source explorer, is now free and open-source
#50I don't get all the posts saying it's sad that it didn't take off commercially. No obstacle prevents grateful programmers from enriching the creators of a useful tool, and expanding the audience of likely users increases the probability of that happening. It's a great looking product (that I had not been aware of when it was commercial) and deserves wide adoption.
It's odd that we're so reluctant to spend money on quality tools that increase our productivity. It pains me to spend the $300 for my editor even though it has paid for itself dozens of times over. I think we're spoiled by open source(and shareware before that).
Yes, this is because everyone is used to getting quality (though usually the quality is very lopsided) software for free. Shareware was a different beast because you still had to pay for if you wanted to use it (initially shareware only asked you to pay for but still gave everything for free, but as developers realized quickly in the 80s, practically nobody bothered and even a small "nag screen" made a big difference while people who removed some features - aka crippleware - saw their sales to significantly multiply).
When you can get something like Notepad++ (or similar) for free, paying for Sublime (or similar) feels like a rip off, even if the latter may do one or two things better.
Also quality rarely gets into the equation: a program that does 28378482 features in a half-baked way for free is often seen superior than a paid program that does 1/1000th of that but what it does it does in a higher quality.