Why AGPL? Open source that stays open
People keep asking why Plainva is AGPL instead of something friendlier like MIT, or no license at all. Fair question — most notes apps don’t think about licensing until a lawyer forces them to. I thought about it on day one, because for a tool that’s going to hold your notes, the license was never really about the code. It’s about what Plainva is allowed to become later.
The loophole I wanted closed
I’ve watched open-source projects get taken, wrapped in a hosted service, and never given anything back — the code stays “open” on paper while the real value quietly moves behind someone else’s login. AGPL closes that door: you can use Plainva, read it, change it, run your own fork — but the moment you build a service on top of it, that service has to stay open too. It’s not about restricting you. It’s about making sure Plainva, or any fork of it, can’t quietly stop being open ten years from now.
The same instinct sits behind the fact that Plainva runs entirely on your machine and keeps your notes in storage you already own. There’s no Plainva server for anything to sit on, which isn’t just a privacy nicety — it’s a refusal of the model where a company hosts your stuff for free and finds a way to monetize it later. There’s nothing to monetize here, because there’s nothing to see.
How I actually keep the lights on
Grants for open, public-interest software, and voluntary support through GitHub Sponsors, Ko-fi and Liberapay — that’s the whole model. No data harvesting, because there’s nothing to harvest. If Plainva ever charges for something, it’ll be a real service with real running costs, like hosted sync, never a paywall bolted onto a feature that already runs fine on your own machine.
Open license, no lock-in, funded by people who want this to keep existing. If that’s the kind of tool you want holding your notes, give it a try.
- Source & license: github.com/plainva/plainva
- Support the work: github.com/sponsors/plainva
— Marco