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Fact that you could combine single markdown escape hatch for arbitrary display / interactivity - from And STILL build off all the filter and backlinks power Roam already had... That was the novel insight Chet inspired {{todo}} Rich hickey inspired {{[[TODO]]}}
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So much of the hard work in design comes with figuring out details of the workflow and conceptual model - often only by months of working with users. Open sourcing actual code for consumer tools is red herring, ignores other contributions to commons
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Replying to @mekarpeles @RoamResearch and @AthensResearch
Open source was totally irrelevant - at least for me. Never needed to read your code, definitely was never going to use. What mattered was you pushed the conceptual frontier.
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I agree there are many valuable forms of contribution: One not needing a resource is not grounds for justifying it be closed. The world is built on resources I, in my privileged position, don't need and which others do. All things equal; show work, share, & enable.
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I sympathize with Conor here—it's already so hard to get a tool like this off the ground; adding more constraints (i.e. on production flywheel) seems like asking for trouble. I love that we've found some models that work (e.g. open core); I'd love to see a playbook collection.
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I struggle with this in my own work. It's obvious that if it's to succeed in the long term, Orbit wants to be an open standard with OSS implementations. But it's also obvious that there are enormous path dependencies; it's not at all clear when and how it's best to move to open.
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My current inclination is to rapidly publish sources under restrictive "source available" licenses, then slowly move modules to open licenses from the bottom of the stack upwards as I better understand my path to sustainability. But who knows…
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I'm intrigued by the promise of "crowdfunded" open-source, but I'm worried about essential irreversibility. e.g. people say "I'll open-source my thing if I hit $X/mo in sponsorship"… but then you trade equity *permanently* for potentially-temporary MRR. Seems like a bad trade.
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