Oddbean

The pear stack which makes the underlying connections work is open. The rest will be open once they have mostly finalized the way it is built. They are building an ecosystem & don't want people building lots of other things that depend on parts which may still change dramatically. A couple of fairly large updates are on the way which should get things closer.

Appreciate your answer and nothing against you, but if this is what they say that justification makes no sense to me. Which are the Keet-specific parts that lots of other things would be built on? Does their stack has that much traction with developers? Or is it something else? Too much cathedral/ central planning for an open protocol for my taste

There are people building with the underlying stuff already (holesail/liveport for example, my brother's peardrive project, & there are a bunch of other things that could be built very quickly). There are modules that connect the back end to the front end stuff which are not finalized yet. If everyone starts building with code that will be changed, then the entire ecosystem breaks. It's the same reason there are so many constraints around linux kernel development & bitcoin development. But they have opened the parts that make the connections. When you use it or build with it, it is pretty obvious that it all works as described. And the front end stuff is still clunky.

They've been open sourcing pieces of it as they are "completed." So more of the parts that make it work have been released on an ongoing basis. Their ID system still isn't FOSS yet, and some other things. The entire Pear Stack is open source though and has been the whole time.

I meant that's not a bad policy. I know the guys and so just trust them personally, but if you have no basis of them, their history, and what seems likely to you, then yeah that's a very prudent stance to have. Same goes for all the software we use. In a very similar sense neither MacOS or Windows is open source. For Mac the kernel is open source because its based on Linux, but things like the user interface and graphics engine are closed source.