I'm assuming the people who are asking for Orion to be open source are not paying for it.
I think a blog post on Orion's transparency is enough. The fact that there is Orion+ is enough to warrant no need to have tracking or 'enshittification'.
If you like Kagi and Orion, supporting development by paying for it makes sense.
Open sourcing everything of Orion means that Orion+ will be open source which defeats the point of supporting development of Orion directly.
I've seen projects start open source, change to closed source and then add in the enshittification later. It doesn't matter if the code is 'open' the source code would eventually be unmaintained and have security holes which there is no time in the world for anyone else to maintain.
> I'm assuming the people who are asking for Orion to be open source are not paying for it.
I think this is an odd/slightly-disingenuous statement.
I mean, I'm on linux, so I'm not, I'm happily paying for kagi though, and would pay for Orion+ if it was available to me :)
I would also very much like it if Orion was open source, it would make me feel a lot better committing to and recommending a browser if I had actual assurances it's behaving appropriately, beyond a company saying "trust me", no matter how nice/cool they seem at the time.
Honestly, I kinda wish Orion+ was the only option, I think having a free option (and the incentives that can create) is kind of antithetical to Kagi's whole raison detre.
> I would also very much like it if Orion was open source, it would make me feel a lot better committing to and recommending a browser if I had actual assurances it's behaving appropriately, beyond a company saying "trust me", no matter how nice/cool they seem at the time.
Kagi isn't 100% open source but you still use it and recommend it?
How do you know they aren't spying on the backend?
There's not really a reasonable local alternative to running something like Kagi, so one kind of just have to hope for the best with the least shady looking option or not use web search at all. It would be nice if they at least had a 3rd party audit validate their privacy claims... but Kagi is at least a step in a better direction than any common search option, even if they might still actually be spying on you for all you know (and keep that in mind if you choose to use it).
The same is not true of browsers, to the extent you can even build/use privacy conscious versions of Google's browser project because Chromium is open source! To trade that away for closed source on the promise of another company who was only able to build a browser because of an open source engine is an unnecessary step backwards and should be bothering people, as much as Kagi appears like the nice company for now.
> I'm assuming the people who are asking for Orion to be open source are not paying for it.
I don't know about the others, but I'm an Orion+ lifetime purchaser just because I like what they are trying to do and it's a good phone browser for my work phone. I'm not sure I follow why specifically people who pay are supposed to be uninterested in it being open sourced?
> If you like Kagi and Orion, supporting development by paying for it makes sense.
> Open sourcing everything of Orion means that Orion+ will be open source which defeats the point of supporting development of Orion directly.
Sure, one should support the development costs. Can you elaborate why you feel that relates to Orion being freeware vs open source or why it defeats the point of Orion+? The two aren't differentiated by functionality, Orion+ is a token of development support.
> I've seen projects start open source, change to closed source and then add in the enshittification later. It doesn't matter if the code is 'open' the source code would eventually be unmaintained and have security holes which there is no time in the world for anyone else to maintain.
Open source isn't a promise that the code will be maintained forever, nothing can guarantee that, it's a promise if the company decides to go closed source the community can decide what to do. Or, even if you don't care about that, a promise of easy/public auditing and hacking. Just look how many Chromium/Firefox build customization, UI tweaks, and forks people have made despite the possibility Google stop contributing to Chromium in the future.
I think a blog post on Orion's transparency is enough. The fact that there is Orion+ is enough to warrant no need to have tracking or 'enshittification'.
If you like Kagi and Orion, supporting development by paying for it makes sense.
Open sourcing everything of Orion means that Orion+ will be open source which defeats the point of supporting development of Orion directly.
I've seen projects start open source, change to closed source and then add in the enshittification later. It doesn't matter if the code is 'open' the source code would eventually be unmaintained and have security holes which there is no time in the world for anyone else to maintain.