Clarification on project's license and open source state · standardnotes/forum · Discussion #3196
github.com
Hello 👋, Just came across this project, and saw the app being advertised as open source, like on this page where it's advertised as "100% open source". Looking at the app repo though, the licensing...

Hello everyone,

I’ve been using Standard Notes on the recommendation of Privacy Guides since the beginning of this year, I believe, and it has truly been a fantastic experience. It serves my purpose perfectly, is truly cross-platform, open source, and lightweight. It was a real find, and I couldn’t be happier to have it installed. However, it seems that they are planning to change the licensing to one that restricts companies from abusing their code (which makes sense), but I wanted to know if this goes against the guidelines in terms of considering it recommendable.

I don’t really understand licenses, so correct me if I’m wrong, but with this change if the project becomes private, a fork couldn’t be created for all users who want to continue having the software format but not the backend… Is that correct?

Thanks

  • hedgehog@ttrpg.networkEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Oh cool! I’ll check those out.

    Having looked at it a bit more, even if it doesn’t end up replacing Standard Notes for me, it still looks promising, particularly given the ease of self hosting it. Self hosted it looks like it could be useful for shared notes, too, even though that doesn’t seem to be its intended use case.

    A big part of the appeal for me is that Standard Notes already had a bunch of editors and that it was easy to create my own - they provide a starter app and you can just use React and/or any web libraries of your choice. I’ve looked through the Trilium docs and while they’re not as good, they’re probably good enough.

    Another big difference is that Standard Notes also sandboxes its editors, such that they only have access to the current note. It looks like Trilium’s executable JS code notes lack a similar feature. Then again, that also has a positive side effect of meaning plugin devs have a lot more power and flexibility in terms of what they build.