Why Not
Well, for one, I use an infrastructure and deployment/staging stack with basic telemetry from a service that is not public. It’s proprietary software belonging to someone else, and I do not want to reveal their secrets (the way their product works, not literal keys) without their permission first.
Additionally, when I first started this project, open-sourcing it never crossed my mind. It was only once we got to public beta that I started hearing people ask me about that kind of stuff, and honestly, by that point, the app was already complicated and entangled enough with certain things, that to this day, I’m not entirely sure are safe to publish to the whole internet.
But, I do have plans to make tools, extensions, and other parts to Tavrn open source, with contributions allowed, or at the very least available to view.
The Actual Problem
This brings me to the real conversation I want to have, the one around open source software in general.
It’s one thing to not use, or not want to use, software that isn’t open. It’s completely another to assume wrongdoing or discredit someone’s project because it isn’t open source. And it’s certainly not okay to pressure developers, guilt them, or force them to open-source their work if they don’t want to.
Not open-sourcing something is perfectly okay. Wanting to open source something requires a lot of things to line up in the first place, and if a project was never intended to be public at all, that’s a whole different story entirely, because most people build differently depending on whether the project was ever meant to be public from the start. Converting after the fact is a problem that requires significant amounts of auditing once you’ve grown to a certain scale. 5 people using your app is completely different from 30 people using your app, and you have to adapt quickly to not lose your existing consumer base. You adapt or you lose people. That’s it.
Resentment
And, the last piece of this: resentment.
When anything is pushed on you, or shoved in your face every 10 seconds, with people yelling at you about it, in a specific way, you will begin to grow negative feelings toward that thing. That’s simply human psychology. And it’s what I continue to face consistently. I’ve also seen it happen to plenty of other developers too on social media, people who are tired of being bombarded by open-source idealists who won’t let it go.
My main message here is: When nobody takes the time or effort to look at your product by its own merits, to determine its actual worth, but rather by a single binary metric, “is it closed or open source,” it makes you feel some type of way. Some of you may not have considered that, because text strips out tone, delivery, and intent that would be obvious if you said the same thing out loud.
What reads as a flat, aggressive statement in a comment might not have been meant that way at all, and even when it is meant that way, it hits differently through text with a wall of strangers watching.
Continuing on, it’s one thing if an individual says something. Though it’s something else entirely when it’s tens or hundreds of messages, replies, or comments. And at that, people who are disrespectful and straight up rude about it.
To bring to a close, I think a lot of the public, especially online, need to learn how to discuss things, how to ask questions, or how to request things, instead of demanding or berating others. Because at the end of the day, nobody owes you anything. It’s something you were taught by your parents and in school, if you want something from someone else, you ask for it. And that principle doesn’t just go away, because your identity is unknown online.
~ vctrl