Hi, quick question about the website, which is evolving quite fabulous.
The page is operated and sponsored by a German company Hanseatic Bits UG (haftungsbeschränkt) & Co. KG .
I’m wondering: what the philosophy behind the project is? How is the funding taking place? What will happen to the crowd-sourced data and the joint effort? Don’t get me wrong, but putting effort in a closed source database that belongs to a company, which then claims the copyright of said database (German Urheberrecht), is something I would like to discuss upfront.
I think you’re confusing open-source with user-contributed. I understand from your message why you want to curate data instead of accepting and showing many people’s contributions, but not why you wouldn’t make the site’s code publicly available.
Generally it would be possible for both the code and the data to be open source.
What would be the benefit of open source code?
A benefit would be code contributions that increase security. But as this is a simple website and not an encrypted messenger app people install or something similar, that is a minor concern and we are happy with managing that risk ourselves.
On the other hand, it further adds overhead with potentially no benefit and people who create similar projects (which there are lots of) have it even easier to create a (subjective) user-friendly and great solution. That is not something we want to support as this would further move us away from streamlining that database which leads to inefficiency.
We also noted that each project is quite reserved when it comes to streamlining benefits and there are lots of different communities with different opinions and approaches. We streamline it our way and people may use it or even contribute if they feel like it.
Also: https://www.trevorlasn.com/blog/open-source-is-where-dreams-go-to-die
What would be the benefit open open source data?
People could probably contribute quicker as it would open more approaches instead of submitting our form.
Other than that it would be a nightmare to streamline as people would have lots of opinions about which categories to add, how to structure them, what to add, what not to add, how to categorize entries. We simplify this by giving people the option to suggest whatever category, company and product they want. Then we have a suggestions database, can cluster, validate, collect more info, evaluate and then add it. For us that’s a great way of doing same but it’s obviously not a perfect way - yet it works very well for us and does not seem to stop people from contributing everyday.
Again, I’m talking about an open source application, not about user contributions.
The main benefit of this is be that people can know what your application does, and thus it increases trust in your application.
I don’t see any downsides in this for you, unless you want to sell the web application and/or artificially minimise competition.
They stated the downsides: seeing other people creating their own version of buy-european.net, which kind of splinters the repository efforts
As someone who’s regularly seeing people trying to create their own version of this community instead of contributing to it, I kind of see where they come from
This is not an application. It’s a website that shows information. Therefore there is no need to trust the code - the same as 99.9% of all websites and your trusted developer will confirm same for you. If you don’t want to use a website as you don’t trust it because you don’t have the source code, you probably have an interesting Internet experience.
So, again: The code will not be open sourced.
No need to open source the code, but would there be a way to have a backup person in case something happens to you?
There is a backup as we work on it as a team and more than one person has access to it. No need to worry.
Sounds good, thanks!