In general, open source maintainers owe you nothing. Despite maintainers often being volunteers, some users feel entitled to maintainers’ time, submitting feature requests and expecting the maintainers to implement whatever they want. This is wrong. I repeat, open source maintainers owe you nothing.

Ever since I released Shynet, my open source web analytics tool, several people have asked me if I plan to offer some kind of managed version of the service (presumably as some kind of SaaS). While these requests are super exciting and I sympathize with them—not everyone wants to manage their own servers, after all!—it’s not something that I’m considering. Here’s why.

Shynet is a modern, privacy-friendly, and detailed web analytics tool that works without cookies or JS. It’s one of my most successful open source projects. Check out the source code and installation instructions on GitHub.

a17t is my lightweight open-source atomic design toolkit. It emphasizes customization, modularity, and separation of concerns (to the extent that is practical).

PrivacySpy rates companies’ privacy policies on a ten-point scale, so you can easily understand how your data is being treated online. I started PrivacySpy with Igor Barakaiev in the summer of 2019.