this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
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Proton is transitioning towards a non-profit structure | Proton (proton.me)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Standard Notes wants to charge you money to run open source JavaScript code, including other people's markdown and spreadsheet editors, on your own server. To do this, they go out of their way to make self-hosting harder.

  1. Standard Notes went out of their way to make it harder to self-host extensions a couple years ago, which IMO was pretty tasteless on its own. Instead of letting you install a single bundle of extensions with one URL, you would have to manually add each extension and then manually update it later.

  2. They opted for charging for other people's work. Their editor extensions were other people's work. For example, their rich text editor was somebody else's rich text editor with a thin wrapper that allowed it to run in Standard Notes. (Using so many other people's editors also led to a bit of a lack of stylistic direction.)

  3. And then, more recently, they decided to shut off web app access to third-party servers entirely.

"FOSS" only means so much when they dictate what goes into the source code. Unfortunately.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Standard Notes went out of their way to make it harder to self-host extensions a couple years ago, which IMO was pretty tasteless on its own.

I didn't dig into this change exhaustively, but it looked like the old approach wasn't very secure or scalable?

They could have charged for the convenience of providing a syncing server with extra storage, but instead they were basically repackaging and selling subscriptions to JavaScript code which was mostly made by third parties who weren't even aware Standard Notes was using their stuff.

I dunno if you're aware, but 95-99% of the Javascript that has ever run in your browser is open source frameworks or packages, or their sub-dependencies, or their sub-dependencies sub-dependencies, ad infinitum... That's how open source came to dominate the web!

And then, more recently, they decided to shut off web app access to third-party servers entirely.

As in, you can no longer load the web app and point it at your own server?

"FOSS" only means so much when they dictate what goes into the source code. Unfortunately.

All FOSS projects have a team of dictators that decide the direction of the project and what gets merged. If you don't like it, you can fork it or move to another product.

I'm not a huge fan of SN, but nothing you described is different to Proton, who don't let you use your own servers with any of their clients, and have no extension functionality whatsoever.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

You assumed and misinterpreted everything you could assume and misinterpret in order to paint standard notes in the best possible light.

the old approach wasn't very secure or scalable?

No, the older approach was more scalable, and they made it more difficult to do

95-99% of the Javascript that has ever run in your browser is open source frameworks or packages

No, I was not talking about frameworks.

Your response was so offbase and full of assumptions that I simply edited my original post.

All FOSS projects have a team of dictators...

And the Standard Notes team makes a lot of bad choices that make self-hosting harder.

"Just fork it and make your own" is a Hail Mary response... Because most people cannot.