Hi Dynalist team and community.
As a daily (hourly? minutely?) user of Dynalist, I’ve found a few small issues over the past 6-months and reported them in the bugs category. Finding bugs is not unexpected, as with any software you use frequently you’re bound to find some issues, and the fact that we can interface so closely with the creators means that generally we get some pretty fast turn around and direct interaction on these issues. Still, some slip through the cracks, and I’ve found myself thinking “why can’t I just fix these myself?”.
Parts of the service can be tweaked or fixed using power packs or custom CSS, but for the more fundamental issues there is just no feasible way to fix them in a closed source system. I was wondering if anyone else had thought about wanting to contribute to Dynalist, and if the source was available would actively do so? I know I certainly would.
This is not a plea to Dynalist to ask them to open source the product under a permissive license, I simply think it would be great if users could contribute and quickly fix the issues that they deal with that they know how to fix. I’m sure there are source-available licenses that could be employed that would (legally) restrict anyone to only use the source code for development and (mostly) prevent any potential negative commercial effects of making the source available.
The Dynalist community is already so active in the product even without being able to directly make changes to it, I think allowing (moderated) third party contributions would benefit everyone involved and make the product even better.
I’d like to hear others’ thoughts on this matter, and hope the Dynalist team can chime in as well if they would be willing to discuss a potential avenue for allowing third party contributions.