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I feel it is misleading to call d2 "an open-source alternative", when it is developed to support proprietary rendering engine, the diagram examples given in doc

I feel it is misleading to call d2 "an open-source alternative", when it is developed to support proprietary rendering engine, the diagram examples given in documentation were rendered by that engine and the reason given is that the free alternative is inferiour.

alixanderwang 4y ago
It's completely open source. The majority of users are using it with other layout engines. We put in work to make those look good and fix bugs around the integrations with those layout engines. The proprietary layout engine is a completely separate install. I also preface it in every post I do for D2 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33704381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33704381). There's nothing misleading.
- Mikhail_K 4y ago
  And yet your documentation states that the results of rendering with free engines are not as good as with your very expensive proprietary one. D2 is that fake corporate "open-source" intended to sucker programmers into tying their work into proprietary ecosystem.
  - alixanderwang 4y ago
    > the results of rendering with free engines are not as good Can you cite where this is stated? Dagre and ELK can produce preferable diagrams depending on conditions. You can be mad that something isn't free for you, but again, I don't see how you could be misled, as the non-free part is stated upfront everywhere D2 pops up.
    - Mikhail_K 4y ago
      >> the results of rendering with free engines are not as good > Can you cite where this is stated? By the way I've just realised why your github repo does not provide the sources of the diagrams in docs - it would blow your game wide open, once users start asking why they aren't getting the results depicted. And almost no compileable examples, either > You can be mad that something isn't free for you, Will you please stop lying? I am not "mad" because something isn't free, but because you're misrepresenting the nature of your D2 language. It is not something that you're making available to benefit community, but a thinly disguised marketing ploy. > but again, I don't see how you could be misled, as the non-free part is stated upfront everywhere D2 pops up. It is far from prominent on your site, for one.
      - alixanderwang 4y ago
        You're right, d2-docs will be changed to render all diagrams with Dagre or ELK instead. The docs existed before D2 was open source and we had open source layout options. Most of it already is, but there's a few that aren't, just carried over from before. Sorry about that. https://github.com/terrastruct/d2-docs/issues/43 https://github.com/terrastruct/d2-docs/issues/43 > By the way I've just realised why your github repo does not provide the sources of the diagrams in docs - it would blow your game wide open, once users start asking why they aren't getting the results depicted. And almost no compileable examples, either Not sure what you mean no compilable examples. Full source of the docs is at https://github.com/terrastruct/d2-docs https://github.com/terrastruct/d2-docs including all the examples. The first example in the Github repo also had a line "Rendered with the TALA layout engine" so the source was upfront. > Will you please stop lying? I am not "mad" because something isn't free, but because you're misrepresenting the nature of your D2 language. It is not something that you're making available to benefit community, but a thinly disguised marketing ploy. We're running a company, we're absolutely interested in making money. But open sourcing D2 doesn't just help us with user acquisition, it certainly also helps the community in adding another open source alternative in the text to diagram market. And it's good quality code. If we go under, someone else can pickup the torch and fork D2. And it's incorrect to say that the free engines are not as good. They absolutely are suitable alternatives and do beat TALA in many instances. The team behind ELK is very talented and have been working on it for 10+ years. It's not even in our interest to hide the best parts of D2, or else no one would use it. I'd even go as far to say TALA won't ever beat them in all cases, especially when the structure is hierarchical. But that's ok, they all use different algorithms and that's what makes them great for their niches. TALA is specifically for software diagrams, in instances such as if you have many nested containers. We have plans to continue developing more in open-source, such as sequence diagram layouts that were added recently. See https://d2lang.com/tour/layouts/ https://d2lang.com/tour/layouts/ If you can quote a specific piece of text on our GitHub or website, we will change it to make it more clear that D2 is fully open source and TALA is just an optional optimization.

alixanderwang 4y ago

It's completely open source. The majority of users are using it with other layout engines. We put in work to make those look good and fix bugs around the integrations with those layout engines. The proprietary layout engine is a completely separate install. I also preface it in every post I do for D2 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33704381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33704381). There's nothing misleading.

Mikhail_K 4y ago
And yet your documentation states that the results of rendering with free engines are not as good as with your very expensive proprietary one. D2 is that fake corporate "open-source" intended to sucker programmers into tying their work into proprietary ecosystem.
- alixanderwang 4y ago
  > the results of rendering with free engines are not as good Can you cite where this is stated? Dagre and ELK can produce preferable diagrams depending on conditions. You can be mad that something isn't free for you, but again, I don't see how you could be misled, as the non-free part is stated upfront everywhere D2 pops up.
  - Mikhail_K 4y ago
    >> the results of rendering with free engines are not as good > Can you cite where this is stated? By the way I've just realised why your github repo does not provide the sources of the diagrams in docs - it would blow your game wide open, once users start asking why they aren't getting the results depicted. And almost no compileable examples, either > You can be mad that something isn't free for you, Will you please stop lying? I am not "mad" because something isn't free, but because you're misrepresenting the nature of your D2 language. It is not something that you're making available to benefit community, but a thinly disguised marketing ploy. > but again, I don't see how you could be misled, as the non-free part is stated upfront everywhere D2 pops up. It is far from prominent on your site, for one.
    - alixanderwang 4y ago
      You're right, d2-docs will be changed to render all diagrams with Dagre or ELK instead. The docs existed before D2 was open source and we had open source layout options. Most of it already is, but there's a few that aren't, just carried over from before. Sorry about that. https://github.com/terrastruct/d2-docs/issues/43 https://github.com/terrastruct/d2-docs/issues/43 > By the way I've just realised why your github repo does not provide the sources of the diagrams in docs - it would blow your game wide open, once users start asking why they aren't getting the results depicted. And almost no compileable examples, either Not sure what you mean no compilable examples. Full source of the docs is at https://github.com/terrastruct/d2-docs https://github.com/terrastruct/d2-docs including all the examples. The first example in the Github repo also had a line "Rendered with the TALA layout engine" so the source was upfront. > Will you please stop lying? I am not "mad" because something isn't free, but because you're misrepresenting the nature of your D2 language. It is not something that you're making available to benefit community, but a thinly disguised marketing ploy. We're running a company, we're absolutely interested in making money. But open sourcing D2 doesn't just help us with user acquisition, it certainly also helps the community in adding another open source alternative in the text to diagram market. And it's good quality code. If we go under, someone else can pickup the torch and fork D2. And it's incorrect to say that the free engines are not as good. They absolutely are suitable alternatives and do beat TALA in many instances. The team behind ELK is very talented and have been working on it for 10+ years. It's not even in our interest to hide the best parts of D2, or else no one would use it. I'd even go as far to say TALA won't ever beat them in all cases, especially when the structure is hierarchical. But that's ok, they all use different algorithms and that's what makes them great for their niches. TALA is specifically for software diagrams, in instances such as if you have many nested containers. We have plans to continue developing more in open-source, such as sequence diagram layouts that were added recently. See https://d2lang.com/tour/layouts/ https://d2lang.com/tour/layouts/ If you can quote a specific piece of text on our GitHub or website, we will change it to make it more clear that D2 is fully open source and TALA is just an optional optimization.