Comment by littlesnitch
7 days ago
As the author of Little Snitch for Linux, I can tell you what drives us: we are a small company where people (not investors) make the decisions. It was a personal choice of mine, driven by a gut feeling. I'm curious about the outcome...
The Wikipedia page for Little Snitch indicates that it's written in Objective-C. Is that still the case? Before going with the new implementation, did you attempt (or consider) to port the current codebase (using e.g. Cocotron or GNUStep libraries)? If so, how good or bad of an experience was that?
Why is Little Snitch for Linux™ so hard to find from the company homepage[1] and the product page from the legacy app[2]?
Did the fact that you knew it was going to be made partially open source factor into your decision to develop a new, JS-and-DOM-based UI rather than having build targets for a shared, cross-platform codebase? (E.g. so that you wouldn't end up disclosing the source for the proprietary Mac version?)
1. <https://obdev.at/index.html>
2. <https://obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html>
Intentionally not edited to add:
Why are you using minified dependencies (like uPlot.iife.min.js[1] and uPlot.min.css[2]) for a desktop application?
uPlot is also open source (released by Sorokin under MIT), but why aren't you following the terms of its license[3]?
1. <https://github.com/obdev/littlesnitch-linux/blob/main/webroo...>
2. <https://github.com/obdev/littlesnitch-linux/blob/main/webroo...>
3. <https://github.com/leeoniya/uPlot/blob/master/LICENSE>
Sorry, I overlooked that. I actually checked the license only to the point whether we can include it without other obligations and then downloaded what was offered as a download on either the web site or github, can't remember. I decided for the minified version because it's smaller. That's the purpose of minification, after all.
It's somewhat strange that they require the license to be reproduced in every copy, but then offer a download without it. But anyway, I'll prepend the license to the next public release.
Thanks for pointing that out!
1 reply →
I'll post in our blog about the development background later. The Linux version shares no code with the Mac version. Only concepts. It's written in Rust and JavaScript (for the Web UI).
Our site is primarily aimed at Mac users, and most visitors skim rather than read carefully. If the Linux package were more prominent, Mac users would likely click it, struggle to install it, and blame us for the confusion.
And regarding your third question: No. The decision was made when I wanted to run it on our headless servers.
As a paying customer, I wasn't expecting this so thank you! Can you expand more on your gut feeling? Also, I have different security expectations on Linux vs MacOS. Would you ever consider open sourcing the daemon?
It's hard to expand on the gut feeling. I wanted to have the app myself. Adding licensing to the code, limiting functionality for a demo mode, and then wait whether Linux users would pay for it just did not feel right.
Regarding daemon open source: The future is hard to predict, even more with AI being just invented. I would love to make it open source, but if you can feed it into Claude and tell it to convert it to a Mac version, we could lose our income.
For the moment, we prefer to keep it closed because we cannot estimate the consequences of making it open source.