kiselitza

Just thinking out loud.

If not for a gazillion other reasons, a recent outage from Postman should remind us again why proper design decisions matter in devtools.

API workflows shouldn’t live in the cloud. A LOT of devtools shouldn’t live in the cloud. Some tools can’t work without it, all good. But a whole lot of them are there just because of some poor design choices.

Yet…

- No cloud? No outage.

- No cloud? No sync issues.

- No cloud? No data security gaps.

So why keep forcing it where it doesn’t belong?

And it’s not even just the cloud. Cloud is awesome for some stuff. SaaS-like designs are dragging devtools into the same trap.

As a matter of fact, devtools in general shouldn’t feel like SaaS platforms. Unless we’re going through app usage dashboards - tabs, and mouse actions are not built for devs.

Devtools should prioritize developer control, not just pay-per-seat subscriptions.

P.S. No need to send me Postman alternatives. I already work on building an awesome one, but chose not to promote it in the post.

I'm working with a VC-independent team that is open-sourcing https://voiden.md in the following months. The goal is to try and foster community while avoiding traps where paid features limit freedom, or even to come off as potentially being just one more of those oss-as-a-strategy bait-and-switch companies.

Now, the feature-limiting bit is IMHO taken care of. However, when it comes to licensing and contributing in general... we are currently debating the strategy and approach, and I have a few dilemmas.

- How to pick a license to balance user freedom with preventing cloud providers from repackaging it? What trade-offs did you face? Or is that not even a concern?

(I understand the theoretical differences between the nature of MIT vs Apache vs GPL, but I'd also argue there are enough people out there able to try and break out of what seemingly is a license constraint, and again, these folks are VC-independent, so avoiding as many uphill battles as possible is preferable)

- Is it even possible to encourage community involvement (e.g., for roadmapping) before being OSS?

(I feel like cloud-based open-core tools face less distrust VS their not-yet-OSS, offline, no-account, no-telemetry counterparts)

Much appreciated!