In keeping with a promise made in early August, Streetwriters has recently open sourced its note-taking platform, Notesnook. Notesnook is a fully open source Evernote alternative with a focus on privacy and support for end-to-end encryption to eliminate server-based note analysis and review.

Notesnook is a project developed by 3 people. During the development process, they found that many users are hesitant to join Notesnook because the software is not open source, and many excellent privacy-oriented software on the market are open source. They also said in their blog that not open source makes them an outlier.

Notesnook’s goal is to give users peace of mind and 100% confidence that their notes are safe and secure, so fully open-sourcing their product is a critical step in achieving this goal, and Notesnook open-sourcing their product is also to prove that protecting user privacy does not have to be sacrificed Convenience comes at the price.

Notesnook lead developer Abdullah Atta shared in a blog post:

Notesnook would not be where it is today without the efforts of the open source community; from Linux at the lowest level of Notesnook to React at the highest level, we attribute this contribution to OSS. It is for this reason that we have decided to adopt the (A)GPLv3 license. I originally wanted to choose a less permissive license (BSL or otherwise) for Notesnook, but freedom is part of open source and we don’t want to restrict you in any way.

All components of Notesnook open source include:

• Web, desktop and mobile clients
• shared library
• Editors and Extensions
• sync server

Most of these components will be in one repository, but the sync server will be open sourced in a separate repository at a later date.

future

Lead developer Abdullah Atta said:

I have been a user of the MYKI password manager for the past few years. This year they shut down their servers when they were acquired and there was nothing I could do, I was forced to do a migration. If MYKI were open source, the whole situation would be very different. I’ll just self-host it and get on with my life. This is what I want the Notesnook to be in the future. A piece of software that survives even if we decide to close it, independent of one party’s decision.

Project address: https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook