Yaak is now open source! I hate do admin it, but the HackerNews, Reddit, and Lobsters folks were right.

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The author originally opposed making their project, Yaak, open source due to past burnout with OSS. After receiving constructive criticism from the open-source community about the potential benefits, they decided to make Yaak open source under the MIT license but restricted contributions mainly to bug fixes, inspired by models like SQLite and Litestream.

I Was Wrong About Open Source

I really like the Reddit comment the author quoted. It’s so, well, Reddit. \s ;)
As for the decision itself: it’s a good move. OSS doesn’t mean you have to accept contributions. You might want to keep a tight policy about what code goes in and if anyone disagrees, then the other part of OSS jumps in: they can fork. In reality though this happens rarely. Most of the time it’s only bigger projects with an active community that can afford to fork. Somebody has to take care of it and take upon themselves the burder the original authors carry.

The comment the author referenced that changed their perspective was quite good - I also thought OSS followed was expressed in the GitHub model of drive-by-contributions, but that’s not necessarily true for all OSS projects. Changed my PoV too.
<a href="https://lobste.rs/s/qeqgiq/why_yaak_is_not_open_source#c_k7tr74" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">https://lobste.rs/s/qeqgiq/why_yaak_is_not_open_source#c_k7tr74</a>

As someone that is about to release a few things in GitHub, this is a great read.
Like the author, I don’t want to keep my projects closed, but I also don’t want to deal with a mountain of open issues and PRs.

I didn’t know what Yaak was until reading this - in fact, I’d never heard of it. I’m all for an open source alternative to Postman!