4 ms·

Yaak is now open source

145 points by pabs3 2y ago

that_guy_iain 2y ago
I think those who care about things being open-source care deeply about it and it is an issue that will make them avoid something. However, that is a very small group of people even in the tech world it's pretty small. Businesses don't care if you're source-available or open-source and decision-makers often won't know the difference. Generally, people looking for open-source are just looking for something free they can use/self-host.
- motoxpro 2y ago
  I agree with this fully. There is a small sweet-spot of people who are doing hobby projects or have SMB tech companies to where a project being open source matters. Note: this is much different from infra being open (React, Linux, etc). People talk about lock in but it's way cheaper to migrate to a different solution than to maintain an entire product of it becomes unmaintained (i.e. an "open source Stripe" where you have to keep up with compliance) I understand that the visibility causes better security but there is no guarantee that the hosted version is using that code. Many billion-dollar companies barely have in-house web developers, let alone someone who can set up a K8s instance or a Hetzner server. "Little tech" is just such small portion of the economy.
- OccamsMirror 2y ago
  As a decision-maker I care if something is open source or not. Because if it is, I can always fork it and maintain my own version if absolutely necessary. Not something I ever want us having to do but knowing the option is there is huge. I don't want to be beholden to another corporation that could pull the rug out from under me. Open source software gives me that comfort.
  - that_guy_iain 2y ago
    I did say "often won't know the difference" and didn't make an absolutist statement. And your comment basic confirms what I said, those who care care deeply and it's an issue they'll walk away from. But as I said, it's a very small niche.
teroshan 2y ago
For some context, this has been posted in reaction (author's admission here [1]) to yesterday's reddit thread "Postman is shit - non-enshittificated (OSS?) alternative?" [2]. In that thread Bruno [3] is also mentioned as a non-curl replacement. [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1fdr9se/i_just_opensourced_yaak_postman_alternative/lmi20tc/ https://old.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1fdr9se/i_just_... [2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1fdfnqd/postman_is_shit_nonenshittificated_oss_alternative/ https://old.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1fdfnqd/postman... [3]: https://www.usebruno.com/ https://www.usebruno.com/
- pferde 2y ago
  [dead]
- qskousen 2y ago
  I've been using Bruno for a couple weeks on a project, and one thing that I've been enjoying is that I can save all the request configuration in files right next to the source, so they are part of the repository. I tried looking to see if you could do that with Yaak but just looking through the documentation, I didn't see any mention of it.
pjerem 2y ago
Oh that looks like a nice product ! And the author’s change in reasoning is interesting to read. At the end of the day, it’s just the internet. It’s full of cool people but also full of toxic people and you have the right to just ignore them. Working on an open source contribution without discussing about it beforehand and being angry at it not being merged always have been a rude and toxic behavior. And like "irl", you have the right, if not the duty for your own mental health, to ignore toxic people. And I don’t mean that it’s rude to create a pull request without prior discussion, it’s ok and sometimes faster for everyone, but when you do this, you have to remember that maintainer(s) doesn’t owe you a merge and that if it’s just closed with an explanation, it’s life, even if you don’t agree with the explanation. Also if your PR was 10 days of work, that’s your own problem.
sakjur 2y ago
I really like the author’s listing of advantages open source provides that you just don’t get with closed source, it aligns very closely with my point of view. This is great reference material for my little archive of “read this to understand my point of view”. I’m also skeptical to what GitHub’s social coding concept has done to maintainership in general. There are projects that don’t need frequent updates, and projects that benefit from being the vision of a single person. Critiquing maintainers for refusing to let others in puts unnecessary pressure on people who just want to share something they’ve made with others.
- faresahmed 2y ago
  Reminds me of Linus' comments[1][2] on pull requests in the kernel's GitHub mirror. The fact that you can't disable pull requests give the impression that it's mandatory to allow anyone to request changes and for you to review them. [1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/7 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/7 [2] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17
  - sakjur 2y ago
    Yeah, especially as you can disable all the other tabs (beyond code). I think that’s been successful in encouraging open contribution projects, but that has also impacted the notion of what open source means to people in a way that isn’t just good.
jraph 2y ago
Kudos, congrats and thanks for open sourcing your stuff. Your openness to feedback, even if not quite pleasurable, is impressive. I believe no contribution is a good tradeoff that still guarantees user rights important to the free software movement. It is important that developers don't conflate free software and open to contribution. If managing contributions is not fun to someone, that shouldn't prevent them from releasing under an open source license, or force them into managing contributions. And if someone releases a version that you like, you can always upstream this stuff yourself if you don't require a CLA or anything like this. I will look into this thing, it seems useful. > Now the desktop Linux users can fix their own bugs (please don't hate me) Fair enough :-)
netdevnet 2y ago
As a Postman user, why would/should I use Yaak?
- efilife 2y ago
  Because it's open source
- permanent 2y ago
  Yaak is open source
- gschier 2y ago
  Great question! (Creator here) Yaak is meant to be just an HTTP client, where Postman aims to do everything related to building APIs (mocking, testing, etc). This makes Yaak simple and easy to use, in comparison
- jslakro 2y ago
  A fair comparison would be Bruno
- revendell_elf 2y ago
  [dead]
- hu3 2y ago
  https://github.com/usebruno/bruno https://github.com/usebruno/bruno would be a better comparison.
weinzierl 2y ago
"Yaak is now open source under the MIT license and open to contribution for bug fixes only." Do you require a copyright assignment, CLA, DCO or other form of identification from the contributors?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
kennydude 2y ago
I've not heard of this before and upon looking this looks fantastic! Cross Platform and sticking to being good at requests! Postman really grinds on me as to how it's gone down a path of forcing "collaboration" when sometimes I just want to ping some requests and test things!
albert_e 2y ago
Guessing... Yaak stands for Yet Another API ... Klient ... maybe?
- gschier 2y ago
  I name it yack because it "talks" to servers and hanged the spelling to make it more unique. I did think of that acronym later on, though!
auggierose 2y ago
So this guy put a "Why not Open Source" article out there, without even being aware that not accepting contributions is an option? I guess it is a feature of the Internet that everyone can talk about things they know next to nothing about. But that is easy to forget.
- mind-blight 2y ago
  I'm not sure where the derision is coming from. It seems like they made an assumption about something they have experience with, got a bunch of feedback, changed their behavior, then took the time to write about their journey for the rest of us. The author is engaging with everyone in good faith. This kind of openness and willingness to change would be applauded.
  - DistractionRect 2y ago
    Exactly! The author could have simply written nothing, convinced themselves they were right about staying closed source or... The author could have just ignored all the feedback they got and stayed closed source or... In the face of opposition, really dug in an tried to double down and further justify staying closed source or... Take the time to sort the constructive criticism out from the negative garbage, digest it, and try to grow from it. They should be commended for being open minded and putting in the effort to grow. And to directly address the GP's comment, in order to grow the conversation has to start somewhere. You learn/grow through experience/engagement, and that's exactly what the author is doing, and in a pleasant, tactful way.
  - auggierose 2y ago
    As I said, this is the Internet, so there is certainly nothing wrong with it, and there is an audience for these kinds of posts. It is just not me, and the comment is probably better understood as a remark to myself.
szastamasta 2y ago
I still wonder why people do this. Build an end-user product and give it away for free. It’s just making our work look worthless and kills small software companies. Cool, share your library or web server, as it allows others to build products around this and you will benefit from theirs. But consumer products? Why are we so cheap? Will we do just anything for „likes” and „internet points”?
- ramon156 2y ago
  Looks nice on your resume, especially if it's used a lot > and kills off small companies This tool is intended for developers. If your company is that replaceable, it's your own fault.
  - szastamasta 2y ago
    Yeah, exactly because of that we have no nice tools for devs. All is built either to get a better job (and then abandoned) or you cannot sell it (and then you abandon it). If we were not that cheap maybe we would have more Jetbrains like companies. Every company is replaceable. I just don’t see doctors or lawyers giving away their work for free. They are just smarter than us.
    - mtndew4brkfst 2y ago
      I just don’t see doctors or lawyers giving away their work for free. They are just smarter than us. "For free" does a lot of heavy lifting here. Of the members of each field, only a fraction of these professionals are doing primary discovery & research in their area of expertise. The rest of them are leveraging the completed research/studies/trials/precedents of others from their fields, in some topics decades worth of it.
- dspillett 2y ago
  > I still wonder why people do this. Build an end-user product and give it away for free. If you don't intend to monetize it at all (or don't think you can), there are other potential benefits: ◌ People using it can draw their attention to your other output. ◌ People using it can be a free testing resource, finding bugs before they affect your own use of the software. They can also be a time sink due to support requests, so this can be a delicate balance. ◌ People using it can be a source of improvement ideas that you have not thought of but which are useful to you once identified. > It’s just making our work look worthless Only if the sole way you judge worth is financial income. > and kills small software companies. Sometimes this is a deliberate part of the equation, when a large company opens some of their product(s), but usually not. If your company is surviving on selling a relatively small end-user product like this then you are in danger from other small companies doing the same anyway, even ignoring any F/OSS options, and need to be competing at least in part on other factors like support, quality, and keeping up with changes in the industry (or your users' industry if that differs) so your product stays relevant and useful.
kalimatas 2y ago
Like the look of the blog. Is it a completely custom blog engine and theme, or some standard thing?
- gschier 2y ago
  Yes, custom. Just a basic Go server with some HTML/CSS
jezek2 2y ago
Another thing you can do is to publish source code for releases only. By keeping the commits internal you don't have to think hard about what you commit and it allows to have other stuff in your repository that logically belongs there but is not suitable for a public release (internal tooling, things used to create the source code initially but not required, etc.).
Chinwe888 2y ago
[dead]
novoreorx 2y ago
I am a Bruno paid user, and I appreciate its design philosophy, such as being local-first and using a text-based DSL to represent request structures. However, the experience with Bruno has been somewhat unsatisfying. It takes a long time to start, and the UI always feels laggy, not to mention that it significantly increases the temperature of my M1 Mac. I tried Yaak today and found that it not only has a smaller package size (160MB compared to Bruno's 300MB) but also runs very smoothly. The UI is so intuitive that it initially seems like it might be missing some features, but I soon found that it has all the necessary features to support regular use cases. I hope Yaak can support Git sync, and if it does, I will replace Bruno with it. Nevertheless, I will support Yaak if you have any business plans; it is a beautiful app worth paying for.
greatgib 2y ago
I hate to admit it, but the Reddit, HackerNews, and Lobsters folks were right. :-)

145 points by pabs3 2y ago

I think those who care about things being open-source care deeply about it and it is an issue that will make them avoid something. However, that is a very small group of people even in the tech world it's pretty small. Businesses don't care if you're source-available or open-source and decision-makers often won't know the difference. Generally, people looking for open-source are just looking for something free they can use/self-host.

motoxpro 2y ago
I agree with this fully. There is a small sweet-spot of people who are doing hobby projects or have SMB tech companies to where a project being open source matters. Note: this is much different from infra being open (React, Linux, etc). People talk about lock in but it's way cheaper to migrate to a different solution than to maintain an entire product of it becomes unmaintained (i.e. an "open source Stripe" where you have to keep up with compliance) I understand that the visibility causes better security but there is no guarantee that the hosted version is using that code. Many billion-dollar companies barely have in-house web developers, let alone someone who can set up a K8s instance or a Hetzner server. "Little tech" is just such small portion of the economy.
OccamsMirror 2y ago
As a decision-maker I care if something is open source or not. Because if it is, I can always fork it and maintain my own version if absolutely necessary. Not something I ever want us having to do but knowing the option is there is huge. I don't want to be beholden to another corporation that could pull the rug out from under me. Open source software gives me that comfort.
- that_guy_iain 2y ago
  I did say "often won't know the difference" and didn't make an absolutist statement. And your comment basic confirms what I said, those who care care deeply and it's an issue they'll walk away from. But as I said, it's a very small niche.

teroshan 2y ago

For some context, this has been posted in reaction (author's admission here [1]) to yesterday's reddit thread "Postman is shit - non-enshittificated (OSS?) alternative?" [2]. In that thread Bruno [3] is also mentioned as a non-curl replacement. [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1fdr9se/i_just_opensourced_yaak_postman_alternative/lmi20tc/ https://old.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1fdr9se/i_just_... [2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1fdfnqd/postman_is_shit_nonenshittificated_oss_alternative/ https://old.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1fdfnqd/postman... [3]: https://www.usebruno.com/ https://www.usebruno.com/

pferde 2y ago
[dead]
qskousen 2y ago
I've been using Bruno for a couple weeks on a project, and one thing that I've been enjoying is that I can save all the request configuration in files right next to the source, so they are part of the repository. I tried looking to see if you could do that with Yaak but just looking through the documentation, I didn't see any mention of it.

pjerem 2y ago

Oh that looks like a nice product ! And the author’s change in reasoning is interesting to read. At the end of the day, it’s just the internet. It’s full of cool people but also full of toxic people and you have the right to just ignore them. Working on an open source contribution without discussing about it beforehand and being angry at it not being merged always have been a rude and toxic behavior. And like "irl", you have the right, if not the duty for your own mental health, to ignore toxic people. And I don’t mean that it’s rude to create a pull request without prior discussion, it’s ok and sometimes faster for everyone, but when you do this, you have to remember that maintainer(s) doesn’t owe you a merge and that if it’s just closed with an explanation, it’s life, even if you don’t agree with the explanation. Also if your PR was 10 days of work, that’s your own problem.

sakjur 2y ago

I really like the author’s listing of advantages open source provides that you just don’t get with closed source, it aligns very closely with my point of view. This is great reference material for my little archive of “read this to understand my point of view”. I’m also skeptical to what GitHub’s social coding concept has done to maintainership in general. There are projects that don’t need frequent updates, and projects that benefit from being the vision of a single person. Critiquing maintainers for refusing to let others in puts unnecessary pressure on people who just want to share something they’ve made with others.

faresahmed 2y ago
Reminds me of Linus' comments[1][2] on pull requests in the kernel's GitHub mirror. The fact that you can't disable pull requests give the impression that it's mandatory to allow anyone to request changes and for you to review them. [1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/7 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/7 [2] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17
- sakjur 2y ago
  Yeah, especially as you can disable all the other tabs (beyond code). I think that’s been successful in encouraging open contribution projects, but that has also impacted the notion of what open source means to people in a way that isn’t just good.

jraph 2y ago

Kudos, congrats and thanks for open sourcing your stuff. Your openness to feedback, even if not quite pleasurable, is impressive. I believe no contribution is a good tradeoff that still guarantees user rights important to the free software movement. It is important that developers don't conflate free software and open to contribution. If managing contributions is not fun to someone, that shouldn't prevent them from releasing under an open source license, or force them into managing contributions. And if someone releases a version that you like, you can always upstream this stuff yourself if you don't require a CLA or anything like this. I will look into this thing, it seems useful. > Now the desktop Linux users can fix their own bugs (please don't hate me) Fair enough :-)

netdevnet 2y ago

As a Postman user, why would/should I use Yaak?

efilife 2y ago
Because it's open source
permanent 2y ago
Yaak is open source
gschier 2y ago
Great question! (Creator here) Yaak is meant to be just an HTTP client, where Postman aims to do everything related to building APIs (mocking, testing, etc). This makes Yaak simple and easy to use, in comparison
jslakro 2y ago
A fair comparison would be Bruno
revendell_elf 2y ago
[dead]
hu3 2y ago
https://github.com/usebruno/bruno https://github.com/usebruno/bruno would be a better comparison.

weinzierl 2y ago

"Yaak is now open source under the MIT license and open to contribution for bug fixes only." Do you require a copyright assignment, CLA, DCO or other form of identification from the contributors?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

kennydude 2y ago

I've not heard of this before and upon looking this looks fantastic! Cross Platform and sticking to being good at requests! Postman really grinds on me as to how it's gone down a path of forcing "collaboration" when sometimes I just want to ping some requests and test things!

albert_e 2y ago

Guessing... Yaak stands for Yet Another API ... Klient ... maybe?

gschier 2y ago
I name it yack because it "talks" to servers and hanged the spelling to make it more unique. I did think of that acronym later on, though!

auggierose 2y ago

So this guy put a "Why not Open Source" article out there, without even being aware that not accepting contributions is an option? I guess it is a feature of the Internet that everyone can talk about things they know next to nothing about. But that is easy to forget.

mind-blight 2y ago
I'm not sure where the derision is coming from. It seems like they made an assumption about something they have experience with, got a bunch of feedback, changed their behavior, then took the time to write about their journey for the rest of us. The author is engaging with everyone in good faith. This kind of openness and willingness to change would be applauded.
- DistractionRect 2y ago
  Exactly! The author could have simply written nothing, convinced themselves they were right about staying closed source or... The author could have just ignored all the feedback they got and stayed closed source or... In the face of opposition, really dug in an tried to double down and further justify staying closed source or... Take the time to sort the constructive criticism out from the negative garbage, digest it, and try to grow from it. They should be commended for being open minded and putting in the effort to grow. And to directly address the GP's comment, in order to grow the conversation has to start somewhere. You learn/grow through experience/engagement, and that's exactly what the author is doing, and in a pleasant, tactful way.
- auggierose 2y ago
  As I said, this is the Internet, so there is certainly nothing wrong with it, and there is an audience for these kinds of posts. It is just not me, and the comment is probably better understood as a remark to myself.

szastamasta 2y ago

I still wonder why people do this. Build an end-user product and give it away for free. It’s just making our work look worthless and kills small software companies. Cool, share your library or web server, as it allows others to build products around this and you will benefit from theirs. But consumer products? Why are we so cheap? Will we do just anything for „likes” and „internet points”?

ramon156 2y ago
Looks nice on your resume, especially if it's used a lot > and kills off small companies This tool is intended for developers. If your company is that replaceable, it's your own fault.
- szastamasta 2y ago
  Yeah, exactly because of that we have no nice tools for devs. All is built either to get a better job (and then abandoned) or you cannot sell it (and then you abandon it). If we were not that cheap maybe we would have more Jetbrains like companies. Every company is replaceable. I just don’t see doctors or lawyers giving away their work for free. They are just smarter than us.
  - mtndew4brkfst 2y ago
    I just don’t see doctors or lawyers giving away their work for free. They are just smarter than us. "For free" does a lot of heavy lifting here. Of the members of each field, only a fraction of these professionals are doing primary discovery & research in their area of expertise. The rest of them are leveraging the completed research/studies/trials/precedents of others from their fields, in some topics decades worth of it.
dspillett 2y ago
> I still wonder why people do this. Build an end-user product and give it away for free. If you don't intend to monetize it at all (or don't think you can), there are other potential benefits: ◌ People using it can draw their attention to your other output. ◌ People using it can be a free testing resource, finding bugs before they affect your own use of the software. They can also be a time sink due to support requests, so this can be a delicate balance. ◌ People using it can be a source of improvement ideas that you have not thought of but which are useful to you once identified. > It’s just making our work look worthless Only if the sole way you judge worth is financial income. > and kills small software companies. Sometimes this is a deliberate part of the equation, when a large company opens some of their product(s), but usually not. If your company is surviving on selling a relatively small end-user product like this then you are in danger from other small companies doing the same anyway, even ignoring any F/OSS options, and need to be competing at least in part on other factors like support, quality, and keeping up with changes in the industry (or your users' industry if that differs) so your product stays relevant and useful.

kalimatas 2y ago

Like the look of the blog. Is it a completely custom blog engine and theme, or some standard thing?

gschier 2y ago
Yes, custom. Just a basic Go server with some HTML/CSS

jezek2 2y ago

Another thing you can do is to publish source code for releases only. By keeping the commits internal you don't have to think hard about what you commit and it allows to have other stuff in your repository that logically belongs there but is not suitable for a public release (internal tooling, things used to create the source code initially but not required, etc.).

Chinwe888 2y ago

[dead]

novoreorx 2y ago

I am a Bruno paid user, and I appreciate its design philosophy, such as being local-first and using a text-based DSL to represent request structures. However, the experience with Bruno has been somewhat unsatisfying. It takes a long time to start, and the UI always feels laggy, not to mention that it significantly increases the temperature of my M1 Mac. I tried Yaak today and found that it not only has a smaller package size (160MB compared to Bruno's 300MB) but also runs very smoothly. The UI is so intuitive that it initially seems like it might be missing some features, but I soon found that it has all the necessary features to support regular use cases. I hope Yaak can support Git sync, and if it does, I will replace Bruno with it. Nevertheless, I will support Yaak if you have any business plans; it is a beautiful app worth paying for.

greatgib 2y ago

I hate to admit it, but the Reddit, HackerNews, and Lobsters folks were right. :-)