I am not sure about deno not being innovative - I've recently started using deno for it's new desktop app support only (https://docs.deno.com/runtime/desktop/)
> What to preserve:
Commit messages that describe what you changed and why, not just what the AI generated. “Restructured Claude’s module architecture, rejected initial state management approach, rewrote error handling from scratch” is evidence. “Add rate limiting module” is not.
> The second commit message versus the first is the difference between a defensible authorship claim and a clean “Claude wrote this” record.
That makes no sense to me, as the commit message is probably LLM generated as well. (and even easier to generate as it doesn't have to compile or pass automated tests).
Not sure why you were downvoted, but I agree with you.
Anyway, you may want to take a look at nsis, at least when I needed an installer for a windows application many years ago, it worked fine for me. It doesn't produce an .msi but on the other hands it's fast.
Another meanwhile somewhat out-of-date option is squirrel, but it offers a auto-updater, which is very useful.
> You pay the Maintenance Fee as long as you use the project.
What does that even mean?
I built one-off apps for small businesses that I never touch again or maybe every 5 years.
Okay, at least paying perpetually for something I don't use anymore is out of question but if I open a solution for a fix I have to check all 80 packages what their current license is and pay them for the month?
No thank you, I'll rather pay for a commercial solution or use something free with a sane license. With a commercial offering at least it's opt-in when I download a new version.
For me that's basically a subscription fee for one-time download.
> For me that's basically a subscription fee for one-time download.
Not a WiX user, but that's my issue with it too. E.g., AutoMapper, a popular mapping library for .Net recently changed their license from Free to a Subscription. We use it heavily, and may be willing to pay - however: we are still using the same version as of 2 years ago, because there are no new features we care about and there's no need to put in multiple days of work to upgrade "just because".
I miss the one-time-payment option for such things.
The problem is, if its one time payment, companies will just leech off of it indefinitely. It'd be great if companies were contributing, but its gotten to the point where you have to assume heavy bad faith from everyone involved
Big tech companies use open-source software primarily because it is free and unencumbered.
If an author uses a license that makes big tech pay, they will not pay. They will just not use the software. We already see a similar dynamic with AGPL.
It's easy to fall into a trap of thinking "I have several big companies using this software. If I had charged a reasonable license fee, I'd be making $100k/yr on this project." But, of course, if the project has started with this license, it never would have gotten to the point where several big companies were using it.
This is why we very rarely see successful GitHub projects that have asked for payment from the beginning. If a maintainer wants to make money on a GitHub project, the far more common path is: 1) release the software with a free and unencumbered license; 2) wait for people to adopt your software because it's free; and finally 3) once people have adopted your software because it's free, then ask them to start paying you.
In fact, in the early stages of an open source project, if someone opened an issue that said "hey do you want to set a norm of commercial users paying to use your software?" it would be rational to say no! You don't want to scare off big tech engineers. Better to wait until they're already using the software.
> If an author uses a license that makes big tech pay, they will not pay.
That's not my experience.
> But, of course, if the project has started with this license, it never would have gotten to the point where several big companies were using it.
That is very possible. We'll have to wait to see if any projects start with a maintenance fee then become popular.
> "hey do you want to set a norm of commercial users paying to use your software?"
My ideal would for the norm to shift such that companies think, "We're using this Open Source project, are we already paying the maintenance fee?" I don't know if that will actually work out but I know that if we don't try it will not.
It works, but has it's problem, like memory leaks if you forget to dispose the objects and an upgrade to a newer version had a bug in it's ubuntu binaries that any simple test would have caught.
There is a higher quality commercial wrapper that is only free for gpl'ed solutions.
Which is what I see with some projects, even though the software itself is free, the c# wrapper done by a third party costs money which makes me loathe to use it, as it hinders reuse.
In that case I would try to specialize, at least for marketing purposes.
For example pick Angular/React/Vue instead of typescript/javascript or another specialized stack.
If most of your colleagues are doing c# mvc then don't do the same thing, but complement them. Either pick a frontend technology as I already mentioned or do openapi specs or something else that's useful for your ideal client.
In my experience people prefer hiring specialists and will overlook other missing qualifications if you tick a core skill.
With cloudflare being a cloud company I am pretty sure that building native desktop apps is not exactly their highest priority.
I think I'll have to look at options again.