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Every time I use tldraw, I’m amazed anew how excellent it is. If you ever need a case study for Just Works™…
Right, so tldraw is not open source any longer. You can still save your stuff locally but their going closed source and taking venture capital are warning bells.
Gotta love capitalism. Makes everything better, doesn’t it?
This is the older, open source version (MIT license) of tldraw:
Online: https://old.tldraw.com
Source code: https://github.com/tldraw/tldraw-v1
Not nearly as nice as the current version (no auto snapping, auto text flow, custom font, etc.) but could be something someone forks and enhances in a similar direction.
@aral oooh it even has rather beautiful freehand lines!
@ctietze Wait till you see the smart snapping between objects as well as object labels, etc.
It’s beautifully minimalist. As simple as it needs to be and no simpler. I can only imagine how much work has gone into keeping it that simple.
It looks really useful. If that's MS Comic Sans, count me in!
@Walrus Looks like it’s their own font… tldraw_draw is what I see in the dev panel.
Aha! Looks close enough, though.
@letime64 Not related, afaik.
@aral @letime64 I contributed to the project, they use my ink ;) https://github.com/steveruizok/perfect-freehand
@steveruizok @letime64 Nice :) (And lovely ink, by the way.)
@letime64 @aral they're good friends! and tldraw creator @steveruizok was a contributor to excalidraw, eg: excalidraw uses some of the same digital ink tech
@aral here's an alternative with an Open Source license: https://dgrm.net/ (I've tried it for a few small things and it's great)
@benjaoming Thanks. I thought tldraw was open source still. Hadn’t seen that they’ taken venture capital and gone closed source.
Yay, capitalism.
@aral Oh interesting that it used to be open source and isn't anymore. I've seen other open source 1-person sideprojects developing their business side to a worrying degree. Of course, the person doing it needs an income... but changing the license and selling it is not it.
@benjaoming They got VC.
@aral @benjaoming the worst form of selling out
@benjaoming
The right way IMO is having 2 licenses. One open for free and one closed for commercial. Or get paid for support.
@aral
@raul Looks nice but, sadly, VC-funded and – please correct me if I’m wrong – closed source.
So either it will have to exit (get bought by a bigger fish or IPO) or fail fast (goodbye all your diagrams).
Best of luck with it but I’m going to stick with the open source tool where I can save stuff locally (note tldraw is also VC-funded so it’s not perfect by any means but at least it’s not proprietary) :)
@raul Ah, scratch that, apparently tldraw used to be open source, the latest version isn’t.
Fun times 
"The original version of tldraw will remain available on Github and MIT licensed, though it will be moved to a new repository WHEN WE OPEN SOURCE THE NEW VERSION. We will no longer be actively maintaining the original but will be happy to support a community fork under a different name."
@aral On one hand, shifting focus to profit will inevitably lead to enshittification.
On the other hand, for a size-able open source project to be viable, it needs support.
While not informed of the details, I imagine that the authors have had to make some hard choices.
@aral To give some context, the obvious decision here would have been to build a commercial / closed source or hosted SaaS app on top of the open source tldraw library. That’s Excalidraw did and it’s worked out well for them. But I was seeing (and still see) a huge demand for high quality canvas SDK on the market, which would mean significant investment in SDK features and APIs, and need a different way of sustaining that directly
@aral this looks a lot like draw.io which I use a lot. Nice open source alternative if you’re looking for one.