Wow what a 180 from just a year ago when their blog said, "For companies that handle sensitive information, deploying open-source scheduling software on-premises can offer an extra layer of security. Unlike cloud services controlled by external vendors, on-prem installations let teams maintain full ownership of their infrastructure. " ¹
I just cannot trust a company that does a bait and switch like this.
¹ https://cal.com/blog/open-source-scheduling-empower-your-tea...
I also replaced Radical with rustical, and I gained free push updates.
https://cal.rs/ and https://github.com/lennart-k/rustical
And if you wanna try it out. https://cal.ache.one/u/ache
Their internal IT infrastructure runs self-hosted OSS wherever possible. I don't think cal.rs is a toy project, they know the perils and headaches of doing open source.
Teams, Organizations, Insights, Workflows, SSO/SAML, and other EE-only features have been removed
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A few important changes to note:
We will no longer provide public Docker images, so your team will need to build the image yourselves.
Please do not use Cal.diy — it’s not intended for enterprise use.
There you go, guaranteed community ownership of the code, best face and "good will" as promised by choosing a FOSS license to begin with, and future rug pulls averted.
Seeing it from the other side of the fence: if you see that all contributors are required to cede controlling power into a single hand (except certain Foundations, yadda yadda), it's not proper Open Source in spirit, only in form; and closeups are just a change of mind away.
From that page:
> Today, AI can be pointed at an open source codebase and systematically scan it for vulnerabilities.
Yeah, and AI can also be pointed at closed source as soon as that source leaks. The threat has increased for both open and closed source in roughly the same amount.
In fact, open source benefits from white hat scanning for vulnerabilities, while closed source does not. So when there's a vuln in open source, there will likely be a shorter window between when it is known by attackers and when authors are alerted.
Look, tech companies lie all the time to make their bad decisions sound less bad. Simple example: almost every "AI made us more efficient" announcement is really just a company making (unpopular) layoffs, but trying to brand them as being part of an "efficiency effort".
I'd bet $100 this company just wants to go closed source for business reasons, and (just like with the layoffs masquerading as "AI efficiency") AI is being used as the scapegoat.
I am now actively rooting for cal.com to go out of business now as a cautionary tale for any company thinking about taking open source projects proprietary.
FOSS || GTFO
The thing that's always concerned me with them is questions of "what level of access is required to the system(s) actually hosting my calendar data?" and "if this vendor is compromised, what level of access might an attacker in control of the vendor systems have?" Obviously this will vary by what kind of access controls backends have (e.g. M365, Google Workspace, assorted CRM systems, smaller cloud providers, self-hosted providers, etc.).
Edit: basically, with a lot of these systems, what's expected to be the authoritative data provider/storage?
Adoption of the OSS version must not have been very high, otherwise I would have expected a Valkey / OpenTofu style, community-led fork.
Maybe I'm being critical but the copy gives me the ick
Edit: I just realised this is by cal.com. I'm leaving my comment intact, if anything it adds to my ick