alt Hacker NewsFirst of all, great tool!
> trust
That's exactly right. The main attractiveness of your tool comes from the "never leaves your browser", insinuating that other similar services do send your data to a server and then who-knows has access to your sensitive data. I really like that angle. But we don't know you. We can use some tools to check that nothing is transmitted today. But who knows about the future? Maybe you change your mind? Maybe once your service becomes popular you sell it for $$$ and the new owner silently pushes things to a server "totally securely, we promise"? Or is even malicious?
> anyone can see the html/javascript
Seeing minified javascript is not the same as open source. Nobody would claim that the google doc UI is "open source".
If you open source this and it turns out as great as it seems then it can make you world famous. If you keep it closed then it will probably disappear in the vast sea of similar sevices, server-based or not (since avg Joe doesn't know the difference and doesn't care). It's your choice to make.
> Though, maybe I'll add something where you can pay to get the desktop version
Ah, thanks for your honesty here. An angle describing your project in a more bad-faith way could now be that you run beta-testing of your proprietay software through this "free" service and intend to turn it into a closed pay product once the public testing has fleshed out the main issues. That's obviously something you are free to do instead of an open source product emphasizing freedom.
Thanks!
> trust All fair points that you're making. I see no reason I would change my mind to send PDFs to the server, but I understand your concerns. If I'm reading in between the lines of what you're saying, that the way to alleviate these concerns is to make it open source?
I think that's a compelling argument, but to play devil's advocate if most people realistically working with PDFs aren't developers and thus wouldn't go to GitHub to host it themselves, then what would change for them to have a self-hostable option? If I released a desktop version, might the average person would see that as "private" and have any privacy concerns relieved, whether it was open sourced or not?
There is always a degree of trust you put in any company's software you use, and it's up to the company to be good stewards of that trust. If they break it, it's always bad for business anyways. But there is a point that if it was open source, those who have the desire to do so can continue using it without any concerns, which is fair.
> anyone can see the html/javascript Yes minified javascript is not the same as open source, but mine is not minified. Plain HTML, CSS and vanilla JS. So given that and since all the editing happens in the browser, the entire source code is inspectable for anyone who wants to see.
Given that the average person editing PDFs is not tech savvy, and as you said they don't really know the difference between software options, then given that what do you see as the utility of open-sourcing, from a business or even public good perspective? Genuine question.
> Though, maybe I'll add something where you can pay to get the desktop version I can see why someone would think that, but really at this point I'm figuring out what/if there is a monetization method here, and I'm not set on a particular path. I don't have any agenda to just make it free then close it off. That'd probably be a bad business decision anyways. I'm not sure if desktop is something to charge for, or if desktop and the whole thing is better to be free and open-source along with premium features that people can optionally pay for that are outside the core scope. I'm still thinking through it.
Ideally, I'll make all core features open-source while there are also some extra features people are willing to pay for. I'm just still wrestling with even just from the public good perspective, for the vast majority of people that won't host it themselves how would they benefit from open-source versus the core features just being free?
Curious if you have any response to what I've laid out here.
Appreciate your thoughtfulness!! You've given me a lot to think about.