Developer of Monodraw here.

I haven’t updated the official website (priorities and lack of free time).

I’ve pushed out some updates after the maintenance mode announcement but the frequency is not guaranteed since my free time is extremely limited.

I’m still committed to fixing any breakages due to OS upgrades and ensuring the product continues to work.

While I have some new features in the pipeline, I cannot commit to any timelines as I don’t know when I will ship them.

I want to thank everyone who’s supported the product throughout the years, it means a lot to me.

Happy to answer any further questions.

It may not have reached commercial success, but to me it's the best commercial application on MacOS. Nothing comes close in value.

And thanks to being proprietary, no one else can devote time to it, either.

I’ve toyed with the idea of open sourcing the product. I reached the conclusion that it’s not the approach for two main reasons:

- I believe in a strong, centralised product vision and execution - The code will be packaged up and sold by unscrupulous people who will not contribute back

I’m a strong advocate of interoperability and open data formats. The Monodraw data format is not proprietary and I do have plans for a plain text format (currently, it’s just zipped JSON which doesn’t play nice with VCS).

Interoperability is key to competition and avoiding lock-in, so I’ll push in that direction as my time permits.

I understand your concerns about open-sourcing the codebase and won’t try to convince you otherwise. It’s your code.

That said, I would like to share my perspective on the subject, having given some thought to if/how I should open source my code. I don’t feel that I have any ground to stand on if I were to choose not to open source my code. That same code would be uploaded to the internet using a web browser or other tool that is open source. That code is probably compiled or interpreted by a tool that’s open source. For me, it all runs on an operating system that’s open source. Nearly everything that I am able to do as a software developer is built on the shoulders of giants who, out of kindness and conviction in their beliefs, chose to make an entire ecosystem of software available to the world, with source code available, free of charge. I feel that I owe it to the world to pay that legacy forward.

Aye, but you're commenting on a Mac program, which is necessarily developed on a closed, anti-competitive system (and in the context of that ecosystem, accepting it as normal). GP lives in a much darker world than you.

> I believe in a strong, centralised product vision and execution

Fair point! I'm reminded of this quote from Jaron Lanier:

> Why are so many of the more sophisticated examples of code in the online world—like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or like Adobe’s Flash—the results of proprietary development? Why did the adored iPhone come out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth?

>An honest empiricist must conclude that while the open approach has been able to create lovely, polished copies, it hasn’t been so good at creating notable originals. Even though the open-source movement has a stinging countercultural rhetoric, it has in practice been a conservative force.

I love free software, yet most of the software I use is proprietary. (I consider my own apathy as contributing to the problem...)

As for this point,

- The code will be packaged up and sold by unscrupulous people who will not contribute back

an interesting example is Jason Rohrer, who has open sourced all (?) his games.

The way he got around this is that he made a multiplayer game, where the $20 in effect gave you access to the main server. People indeed repackaged his game, sold it on other platforms etc. Yet last I checked, he was doing better than ever. (Probably cause he keeps pushing out updates to keep the game interesting.)

Not sure how well this works for "single-player software", although Aseprite seems to be doing all right. (Though technically not free software anymore, despite being open-source...)

Nitpick: Aseprite is source-available, not open source by the Open Source Initiative's definition. From the Aseprite EULA [1]:

> (g) Source code.

> You may only compile and modify the source code of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT for your own personal purpose or to propose a contribution to the SOFTWARE PRODUCT.

The OSI's definition of open source [2] permits distribution of unmodified and modified copies (with the exception of lone, unmodified copies; I read somewhere that adding a hello world program is a workaround):

> 1. Free Redistribution

> The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

...

> 3. Derived Works

> The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

"free software" is ambiguous to English speakers/writers, but "open source" is ambiguous in its own way.

By the way, there is a "Fork of the last GPLv2 commit of Aseprite" called Libresprite [3].

[1] https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/blob/main/EULA.txt

[2] https://opensource.org/osd

[3] https://github.com/LibreSprite/LibreSprite

> The code will be packaged up and sold by unscrupulous people who will not contribute back

Choose a good license then

A license wouldn't stop the unscrupulous people, they'll keep making clones of it and ignoring the license.

This means I have to start chasing any clones, engage legally and try to take them down. It's just not worth the time - I would rather spend the time on improving Monodraw instead.

To voice support for current state - do what you're already doing, and I agree on focusing on opening up the format.

Don't hesitate to charge for v2, if improvements pile up and you have affordances to do so. Will gladly pay.

It's pretty great already as-is. Thank you.

It’s perfectly fine that it’s proprietary. Just because it exists doesn’t mean other people are entitled to the source code.

There's a cost to open-sourcing code. It takes effort. You must write documentation and clean up your code in many ways. It's good to "clean up code" of course but is that the most urgent thing on your task-list?

Who should pay for that effort? The original author? Yes if they think it's worth it and they can afford to spend the time on it.

There's also a risk whenever you publish source-code, someone might sue you for copyright infringement, or patent violation, etc.

I agree. Nobody owes anyone anything!

I was merely pointing out that it's a shame that

(1) it has apparently been abandoned for years,

(2) people are not able to do anything about that.

(Bus factor == 1, etc.)

Based on the other comments in the thread, I'm sure there are people who would love to contribute.

(Worth pointing out that making something open source isn't zero-maintenance by any means, especially since GitHub still doesn't let you disable pull requests...)

Please not more app-store abandonware. I have a decent amount on both my phone and my MBP. Sad to see, I really liked Monodraw for creating ASCII illustrations for source code (e.g. buffer layouts etc).

Of course, probably it'll be ok for a while, but then some App Store API or updated processor requirements will render it unusable like so many others (particularly on iOS).

So now I've got several abandonware apps that I paid for: Things (v1), Quiver, Artboard and now Monodraw. I can't say any of them really had any non-minor updates since I got them certainly not features (yes, I realize Things did a separate V2 app ... but I wasn't happy about that happening so soon after buying V1). I do realize some of this is Apple's fault in the way the store is structured.

Too bad Apple doesn't enact some sort of source-code escrow such that if an app is abandoned, the source gets published, but with owner-copyright retained so no-one can resell -- as part of the T&C of submitting an app. Maybe after 1 year of abandonment for a "big" company and 2 years for indie-dev apps.

*EDIT*: Happy to see Milen's sibling comment about fixing breakage!! I realize you have to make a living -- is there a way to contribute for these new features (or is it a totally new app -- which is fine!).

> EDIT: Happy to see Milen's sibling comment about fixing breakage!! I realize you have to make a living -- is there a way to contribute for these new features (or is it a totally new app -- which is fine!).

I've considered the idea of letting other developers have access to the source code and help with the development. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure a way to make it fair - e.g., if someone starts contributing, do they start receiving a percentage of the proceeds? What's a fair percentage and what about multiple external contributors?

I could never come up with a workable model, so it's either fully open-source or proprietary. As I mentioned in another comment, I believe the way to go is an open data format which allows interoperability. This way there's no lock-in and competing apps (open or closed) can exist.

For what it's worth, the Monodraw data format is not secret, it's just compressed JSON. I haven't documented it because it's more of an implementation detail and I'd rather spend my very limited time on improving the product.

Hope that provides a bit more context.

Thank you for the comment, apologies if I came off a bit antagonistic! It's just a little frustrating when you see really great apps potentially ending.

It's really too bad there's not a better indie-dev model for the App Store, if I am buying an app (I think maybe I maybe paid $19 for Monodraw -- totally worth it btw), am I buying the app as-is? or do I get updates ... if so how long should I expect to get them and are the updates minor fixes or bigger whizbang features.

I can see that once an app gets to a steady state, there's probably diminishing returns in putting a lot of effort into new features esp. if your market is small. On the other hand, if the app has some sort of subscription, now there is an expectation for updates (not unreasonable, but possibly the numbers might not work for the developer).

I think Pixelmoter sort of got this right, although they did release a Pro version separately (which I also bought). However, I suspect they're a much larger company and probably have quite a large market share and can afford to continue to release updates to keep it fresh (and for someone like me, the app is exactly what I need vs. say photoshop and the price point is reasonable).

At this point, the only apps worth using were released 10 years ago, and have all been removed from Play Store. I have to either use my own backups or download sketchy APKs. I'm not exaggerating, today I tried a number of shoddy disk space analyzers full of bloat and ads, until giving up and just using one from 2014... (except it'd been deleted, so I had to do a bit of digging.)