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Make it Open Source

Feature Request

Hey. Thanks for the awesome tool.

Not exactly a feature request. And I believe you have your reasons for not open sourcing it. But nevertheless I wanted to share a perspective you may not have considered.

There are a ton of other similar solutions out there of various degrees of polish. And the heart of all of them (including Vowen) is those open-weight models anyway. So the fundamental technology you and others use is not a trade secret.

While commitment to do the processing locally and/or with the user-configured providers, and not send user data to the developers sounds great, it's not really easily verifiable. It basically makes Vowen impossible to get a permission to use Vowen in an enterprise environment where information security standards are high. For closed source solutions the matter of trust is often solved through certifications (SOC2, ISO etc). However this is clearly not a viable solution for a side project worked by a team of 2 (both due to overhead to manage processes and cost of such certifications). This effectively narrows down the possible user base.

Now,if you're looking to monetize your app in the future, it may be worth to learn from many AI-powered open source tools out there (OpenCode, Kilo Code etc.). They often have the end user app open source, but provide paid a control plane for enterprises to centrally manage their users and their licenses instead of having to issue and rotate individual tokens to each employee.

So, I hope you'll at least give this idea another thought.

Thanks again for building Vowen.

Alex

Posted by Alexandr Zolotukhin ·
Status: Rejected4 comments

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Comments4

  • Smart Caveman

    •

    Mar 10

    I'd also love to see this open sourced, but FYI it's fairly straightforward to verify claims about local processing without requiring the creators to publish their code. I’m not sure if getting approval to use this tool in an enterprise environment is a real problem for you, but in the event that it is I'll explain how to do it. All you have to do is use the application features that you're suspicious about while simultaneously profiling your network traffic with something like Wireshark. If you're on Windows, a tool called Telerik Fiddler makes it very simple to network traffic affiliated with a specific application or process.

    • Vowen

      Team•

      Mar 10

      That’s right. You can use a tool like ProxyMan to listen to all the HTTP / Websocket connections that the app makes.

  • Vowen

    Team•

    Feb 2

    Hey @Alexandr Zolotukhin ,

    At the the moment we are building towards a first version (v1.0.0), and we are right now at (v0.1.13). There are many ideas we want to be able to try out first, and improve the product in overall quality. Since we are working on this part-time, we have to find time to be able to properly address contributions that may come along in the way, and have to prioritize the task of maintaining a open-source project in whatever shape or form it may present itself. Not to mention any undue attention it might attract from our employers, since all of our work will be done in public. It’s because of these reasons we’ve not yet open-sourced it. But we ourselves have considered it many times, and once we are happy with how the product shapes up in v1.0.0, we’ll come back to this and figure out how to go about it.

    I’m closing this for now. But I’ll move this back to backlog once we’re ready to seriously consider open sourcing it.

    Thank you!

    • jolystep

      •

      Mar 18

      This is an awesome project. The free (and almost open source) aspect of projects like this is what makes it truly amazing imo. You guys rock.