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Comment by TidbitsTornado | Hacker News Reader

This is a great implementation by your team + contributors. Simple but effective. And nice to see you’ve kept it open source instead of some other Show HN submissions where they take open source work, make is closed, change a few things, and claim they’ve created something great.

Im curious to see if you continue building out some other features. While these are great features (copilot, chat, etc), I’d think most users would expect their IDE to have it out of the box (or with an extension) these days

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Thanks for the kind words. Keeping Pretzel open-source was important to us - partly for trust reasons. When most people use Jupyter, they do so with sensitive data. Making a closed source tool simply wouldn't work. I wouldn't have trusted a closed source jupyter alternative with my company's data unless the counterparty was huge and well-known.

To your second point - completely agree that most users would expect these feature from their IDEs today. But, only two IDEs support Jupyter Notebooks: VSCode and PyCharm. You can certainly use them for notebook work but most AI extensions written for VSCode wouldn't be optimized for notebook work (for eg, GH Copilot apparently has difficulty completing code across different cells as per a friend). Secondly, to your point, this is just a start - we're going to be building a lot more Data Analysis specific features that don't exist in any IDE. I think there's a decent space for a tool a like this.

> And nice to see you’ve kept it open source instead of some other Show HN submissions where they take open source work, make is closed, change a few things, and claim they’ve created something great.

The seem to have taken a "BSD-3-Clause" licensed project and change it to AGPLv3 licensed one. That's not the same thing, but it's similar to what you're concerned about.

This is true. All new added code is licensed under AGPLv3. But I fail to see how it's the same thing as modifying and open-source tool and re-selling it as a closed source tool. This is what AGPL gives us - anyone can use Pretzel however they want. They can even re-package and re-sell it if they want so long as they too open-source their modifications and improvements.

Selecting the license for an open-source tool backed by a company is tricky. You want your code to be open-source for it's benefits (for eg, for us one benefit is building trust with people working with sensitive data). But, the history of open-source tools is full of tools that another company just started reselling without doing any of the work (sentry, mongodb etc). So, you need to find a balance. AGPLv3 strikes the right balance for us.

> ... I fail to see how it's the same thing ...

You're right that it is not the same thing, which is why I wrote "That's not the same thing [...]" in the comment you're responding to. I have done the same as you guys (building an AGPLv3 or 'worse' product on top of BSD licensed code) many, many times! Anyway, what you're doing is really exciting!

That's fair, I was mostly responding to "but it's similar to what you're concerned about" because I didn't think the concerns are the same (but I can see your perspective on it too! While we are "giving away" the code, we're definitely posing some limitation).

Thanks for the kind words, we're exited to be building this :)

I would also be happy to video chat with you guys anytime, since we've built similar things over the years (wstein at sagemath.com).

How does that even work, copying in and relicensing someone's bsd3 code as your own AGPLv3?

You're right, that's not how it would work! If you look at our license - all the Jupyter code stays BSD3. If we modify any BSD3 code, the modified code stays BSD3. All the new code we write - in separate files - is AGPLv3 however and is clearly delineated in the repo in the file headers.

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