Yes, we are coming from different places and have some different priorities. I’m an academic with little extra income. I want an excellent notetaking product that works for my workflow, that I can recommend to students, that I can help contribute to with my effort and expertise rather than my non-existent extra funds, and ideally open-source so that it can benefit everyone around the world regardless of their income. You are a tech investor that wants a long-term viable product that works for you and will not risk disappearing, and you are more concerned about losing time and are willing to pay to avoid that. Both are totally reasonable positions.
There are already good, free products available, but not ones that are excellent for academic writing and research, in my opinion. I am fine with a for-profit company making a great product, and in some cases I am willing to pay for that product. But I don’t think it’s right to ask/allow/encourage community members to volunteer time and effort to improve a product (write plug-ins, write documentation) without crystal clear commitments going forward. This is particularly true with designing features (not coding them, but conceiving of the best ways to implement them) and writing documentation, both of which are crucial to having a massively successful product, but for which community members are not compensated. That’s fine with me for a free product, and even for one where the founders and employees make some money, but not if people are going to get rich while the community gets no money and no guarantee of even owning the fruits of their own labor going forward. I understand that many people may disagree or may not understand where I’m coming from. I’ve just spent a lot of time trying to improve various open-source projects only to have them blow up or stall, and like everyone, I have limited time and don’t want to risk it being wasted or exploited.
I’m fine if they charge money for Logseq (I won’t use it in that case, but I have no objection to them doing that). I’m fine if they take it closed-source. My objection is not to them charging for it, but to them refusing to clearly commit to keeping local features open-source forever and free for non-commercial use so that community members who want to volunteer time to the project know that the value of their efforts will not be “recaptured” by the owners of Logseq the way the thousands of volunteer hours used to build the CDDB database was captured to make money for the owners of Gracenote.
I have the same concern with business vision. I want to use Logseq at work, but I cannot look for an official statement about commercial use. It is not about paying for commercial use or not. It is about I feel comfortable to use Logseq at work without worrying about violating license right.
My company policy says:
Proof of Purchase Required
Users who install non-standard software (other than freeware) must retain proof of purchase for the installed software, and be able to present this proof at any time upon request.
Obsidian has their End User License Agreement, which can be presented at a court. I like Logseq because of their “daily journal” style. Therefore, I wish Logseq has similar statement, so that I can start using it at work, regardless it being free for commercial use or not.
Just posted this on discord: Possibly a n00b question, but why are all Logseq plugins free rather than paid? It seems that “buy me a coffee” is the only way for plugin developers to monetize, and this is not always a sufficient incentive. Are there any plans to enable developers to monetize plugins by charging money? This would also be a good way for Logseq to monetize like an App Store and grow the developer community.
With the recent OpenAI announcements I see a lot of scope for Logseq plugins that enable you to interact with your notes in smarter ways, and I fear that we are limiting the development potential due to lack of monetization for developers.