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The original was posted on /r/opensource by /u/sharipova on 2023-12-14 16:02:13.

Hey, Open Source community! I’m Zhanna, cofounder of Anytype: a local-first, E2E encrypted, p2p synced knowledge management and communication app. Website: Our mission is to develop software that supports fundamental digital freedoms in a sustainable manner. For us, that means:

  1. Open code: The code must be open to be verifiable. It includes an open data standard - your data is yours.
  2. The architecture should support full user autonomy from the network. The network should be optional - people and organisations should be able to self-host software on their own infrastructure (thus why we support a local-first approach)
  3. The software needs to improve with time. Ux should be improving and encourage more usage, otherwise it will not be competitive with web2 solutions.
  4. Therefore, the network needs to attract enough resources to continually improve the software and invest in R&D.
  5. Cooperative behaviour of all those contributing it and building on top of it should be encouraged - rewards should encourage cooperation.

We’ve been developing Anytype for 5 years and this past July, released our Public Beta and opened our repositories on Github: .Anytype consists of two layers:

  • AnySync protocol as a local-first protocol that supports encrypted collaboration between multiple people and devices (with user controlled keys). This layer together with our data protocol AnyBlock are published under MIT licence.
  • Anytype client apps (incl. native iOS and native Android) - modular software that allows to work with a graph database visually. They are published under a source available licence.

And that’s where you come in: We’d love to use the MIT license for everything, but at this stage in our development we feel it can potentially harm us. We see two possible risks:

  • Our code can be used by some big company to be incorporated into their offering without contributing back. We’ve seen cases like this with open-source projects like MongoDB and Elastic.
  • It can create a tragedy of commons - someone or many people can launch anytype competitors with a few clicks without investing anything into building it, after that core development of anytype will be under risk.

Ultimately, our goal is to create a system for contributing wherein developers are rewarded and therefore motivated to cooperate with each other and build the missing pieces. We want to create a flywheel where the value generated by the network is distributed to our developer community so the ux improves and more members join, so developers are rewarded more.

Our current licence is the first iteration (). We don’t think it’s ideal and that is why we came to this community to discuss the opportunities and limitations of our approach, hoping to find an improved solution to our goals. Please help us find a new sweet spot to sustainably develop software that respects digital freedoms :)

Why we are building anytype: 

Demo: 

Technical documentation: 

We’d love to hear your feedback and questions!