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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Would your answer change if we were talking about academic research? Where the work is material to the final product? Is there an inflection along the gradient where closing source is better for users? Because e.g. the org is more focused?
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What matters is whether sufficient funding is available to produce the insights you care about. In some domains (often tools for thought because of insight-through-making), this requires funding a $$$-skills team for years. If an academic grant lets you do that, great—OSS away.
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(of course the other thing that matters a lot here is that dollars are not fungible; grant dollars push you around differently from VC dollars / bootstrap dollars / Patreon dollars…)
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I can appreciate an argument that VCs may be less willing to fund a project whose code is open source, though I have a hard time imagining this being a/the deciding factor.
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Venture funding requires that projects be able to produce (lots of) revenue. It is of course possible to produce revenue with OSS, but it's not the norm, and it requires thoughtful strategy. If you have such a strategy, great!
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You also need to explain why your future closed-source competitor, which can leverage your work for free, will not simply eat you. There are approaches for this, too, but again, you'd better have an explicit strategy.
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You and MN said that the hard work of TFT goes in developing the interface — they're not "hard-tech". Less true that closed has an asymmetric advantage over open here.
How quickly is Athens catching up to Roam? Hard to say who ships faster long term — private team vs ecosystem
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It doesn't matter who ships faster; what matters is who produces transformative insight. It also matters whether Athens could have existed prior to a for-profit Roam having existed first. Path dependence rules everything around you…
> It doesn't matter who ships faster; what matters is who produces transformative insight
I am a little confused by this in the context of open source (i.e. whether open source is an issue), but I'm going to defer for a later conversation and not distract this thread.
Don't understand what you mean by "produces transformative insight" in this context. A knowledge graph with bi-di links, block refs, periph vision, etc. does that here, which are features that were shipped
To your latter point, that's not the path we're on now...
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> that's not the path we're on now...
Implementing features according to spec may produce value, but I think if there's transformative insight of is creating a tool developers can extend. Not sure I'd be too confident pursuing an independent direction.
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