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Are there any plans to open source the GUI system? It could be a hugely beneficial for a set of cross platform apps. Thanks a lot for creating this piece of so

Are there any plans to open source the GUI system? It could be a hugely beneficial for a set of cross platform apps. Thanks a lot for creating this piece of software art. I’m a user since the v1 and no matter what the editor du jour is, I always fallback to ST and Vim.

ben-schaaf 5y ago
This question has been asked a lot, so thankfully I've got an easy answer: You don't actually want to build on top of our UI toolkit. We make breaking changes all the time, there's very little documentation and no release cycle at all. This isn't a problem for us as we have in-house knowledge and can fix any breakages trivially, but you don't want every open source project to have to maintain it's own fork of a UI toolkit.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  I completely support this. I write a ton of open-source software, and have many published packages. Each one that I publish is a Responsibility. Like a parent that has children, the package is no longer “completely mine.” All changes and fixes are made, keeping in mind that someone may be dependent upon my work. I’ve been writing SDKs -literally- my entire career (I can link to my very first engineering project, in 1987, where I designed a hardware system, and a companion SDK). A perfectly legitimate reason for keeping code private, is that I am not willing to support it for any use, other than my own personal use.
  - jiofih 5y ago
    There is no obligation to support the code at all though. You can release it once, say it’s unsupported, and let the community pick up maintenance / forks if there’s enough interest. Otherwise, no harm done.
    - Phenix88be 5y ago
      > and let the community pick up maintenance / forks if there’s enough interest. This almost never happen, even when the interest is very high... I love open source and free software, but we should face that this point is more a fantasy than a real thing.
      - hutzlibu 5y ago
        I would say, it depends on the codebase and documentation. Taking up a abandoned mess of undocumented spaghetti code? No thank you. And most "open sourced" repositories are like this. But the ones that have at least rudimentary documenation, something a new maintainer has something to work with - those are the few ones, that might be picked up by some community. Rare, yes - because there is not much fun in writing documentation on your personal pet project in your free time. But it might be still worth it.
    - jandrewrogers 5y ago
      In practice it doesn't work this way. Saying it is "unsupported" does not mean people will respect that boundary, nor will it prevent people from contacting you expecting your time and attention, which is what actually happens. There is significant overhead to open sourcing software.
      - jannes 5y ago
        People won’t respect the boundary if you host the code on github, because it’s just too easy to open issues or pull requests. However, what about just releasing a zip file with the sources and linking it on your downloads page?
        perk 5y ago
        Someone should make sourceavailable.com - A service that automatically pulls my private repos from GitHub and makes it available as open source to other programmers. A read only version of GitHub, without the isssue/PR overhead. Code should be easy to read/download on https://sourceavailable.com/username/repo https://sourceavailable.com/username/repo
- QQ00 5y ago
  You could extent your UI toolkit and profit from it. make it open source and make it free for open source projects and with fee for commercial projects. It's very beautiful and sleek UI and the market of UI are lacking in this area. a lot of people demand this UI toolkit and asking you to release it is a prove that it will be a successful product.
deleted 5y ago
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ben-schaaf 5y ago

This question has been asked a lot, so thankfully I've got an easy answer: You don't actually want to build on top of our UI toolkit. We make breaking changes all the time, there's very little documentation and no release cycle at all. This isn't a problem for us as we have in-house knowledge and can fix any breakages trivially, but you don't want every open source project to have to maintain it's own fork of a UI toolkit.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I completely support this. I write a ton of open-source software, and have many published packages. Each one that I publish is a Responsibility. Like a parent that has children, the package is no longer “completely mine.” All changes and fixes are made, keeping in mind that someone may be dependent upon my work. I’ve been writing SDKs -literally- my entire career (I can link to my very first engineering project, in 1987, where I designed a hardware system, and a companion SDK). A perfectly legitimate reason for keeping code private, is that I am not willing to support it for any use, other than my own personal use.
- jiofih 5y ago
  There is no obligation to support the code at all though. You can release it once, say it’s unsupported, and let the community pick up maintenance / forks if there’s enough interest. Otherwise, no harm done.
  - Phenix88be 5y ago
    > and let the community pick up maintenance / forks if there’s enough interest. This almost never happen, even when the interest is very high... I love open source and free software, but we should face that this point is more a fantasy than a real thing.
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      I would say, it depends on the codebase and documentation. Taking up a abandoned mess of undocumented spaghetti code? No thank you. And most "open sourced" repositories are like this. But the ones that have at least rudimentary documenation, something a new maintainer has something to work with - those are the few ones, that might be picked up by some community. Rare, yes - because there is not much fun in writing documentation on your personal pet project in your free time. But it might be still worth it.
  - jandrewrogers 5y ago
    In practice it doesn't work this way. Saying it is "unsupported" does not mean people will respect that boundary, nor will it prevent people from contacting you expecting your time and attention, which is what actually happens. There is significant overhead to open sourcing software.
    - jannes 5y ago
      People won’t respect the boundary if you host the code on github, because it’s just too easy to open issues or pull requests. However, what about just releasing a zip file with the sources and linking it on your downloads page?
      - perk 5y ago
        Someone should make sourceavailable.com - A service that automatically pulls my private repos from GitHub and makes it available as open source to other programmers. A read only version of GitHub, without the isssue/PR overhead. Code should be easy to read/download on https://sourceavailable.com/username/repo https://sourceavailable.com/username/repo
QQ00 5y ago
You could extent your UI toolkit and profit from it. make it open source and make it free for open source projects and with fee for commercial projects. It's very beautiful and sleek UI and the market of UI are lacking in this area. a lot of people demand this UI toolkit and asking you to release it is a prove that it will be a successful product.

deleted 5y ago

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