13 posts filed under opinion.
Three months after publishing our open source rationale, here is the honest count: 14 external issues and 4 human pull requests this quarter, an all-time merge record written in two days by one contributor, and the requests we have not said yes to.
Why VisorCraft keeps splitting its catalog into small, focused, single-purpose projects instead of merging them into one suite, and the one place a suite is actually the right answer.
We run our entire desktop catalog on KDE Plasma 6 over Wayland every day, so this is the honest state report: what works, what still bites, and which defaults need flipping.
The honest version of what VisorCraft open sources and what stays closed: the rule fits in one sentence, and the interesting part is where the sentence bends.
Four VisorCraft repos are forks of upstream projects, and each has a different relationship to its upstream, because a fork is a tool with several legitimate uses rather than a declaration of war.
MongrelDB encrypts every page, WAL frame, cache entry, and index checkpoint with AES-256-GCM, and Roamarr stacks field-level encryption on top, because encrypted at rest only means something when the defaults cover the boring files too.
Every VisorCraft app ships GPL-3.0-only, and the choice was made deliberately against LGPL and against dual licensing, because copyleft is the whole point of publishing.
Streaming keeps repricing, fragmenting, and delisting the things you wanted to watch, so we run the library on our own hardware with Stash as the server and Sinema as the Android TV client, and in 2026 that stack is finally boring enough to recommend.
The lock-in of hosted tools is a pile of small papercuts, so we built Tailshell for the terminal and a tiny Mailspring plugin for the inbox.
Hosted travel apps ask for an account because your itinerary, passport scans, cards, and real-time location are unusually valuable once correlated, and the account is the correlating key, which is why Roamarr runs as one container on your own hardware with no account at all.
Roamarr, Foxden, SpiderTypes, Sinema, and Tailshell all ship without accounts on our infrastructure, and the interesting part is what that absence does to the data model once the users table stops being the vendor's.
Every VisorCraft project, including the closed-source MongrelDB, ships with no telemetry, no event hooks, and no opt-out switch, because there is nothing to opt out of.
Every VisorCraft app works fully offline, with no account, no cloud, and no telemetry, and this is what that constraint actually buys you once the cloud is just one option among many.
