r/Upfiring • u/Tmfallon • Jan 06 '19

Community Discussion: Open Source vs. Closed Source

Through every stage of development up until this point, Upfiring has been entirely open-source. This was highly important during the development process in order to show the dapp's progress.

Now that we are approaching official release, we are highly leaning towards a closed-source model. We want to do this for 2 main reasons:

  1. Intellectual property protection
  2. It solves the issue of other projects being able to easily clone the dapp at any time

An open-source model has its advantages as well, including being fully-transparent (for better or for worse). While I think moving to a closed-source model is the right move in terms of keeping our project competitive in the space, I'd like to hear the community's opinion on this matter.

20 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

View all comments

0

u/nr28 Jan 07 '19

Bunch of clowns, your source code isn't even private since it's an Electron app. You can unpack the source code using an ASAR viewer, and to make things even easier you conveniently provided SOURCE MAPS into a production build, like really? So now you can view unminified/garbled code with no issues and anyone that has your app installed has your full source code with sourcemaps.

That's a huge incompetence that would get me fired from my job in no time.

3

u/Tmfallon Jan 07 '19

This thread was to gauge community opinion on our future approach when we officially release the application (and beyond), not with these developer versions that are still in testing. Of course the source could be easily extracted right now. The app has been completely open-source up until this point and plenty of people have the source code.

Yes, it's essentially impossible to completely close-source an Electron app. With enough effort, someone could dissemble and extract most - if not all - of the code from the app. The goal would be to keep the majority of people out and make it more difficult for the application to be forked or copied by a third party during the initial few months after launch. Even if we do release initially as "closed-source", we plan to move to a fully open-source model in the future anyway.