So I went to https://trace.gl/ (checkout the video)
and clicked on the Get it Now link noticed that you can’t download it (or get the source)
Now last week, there was a ‘put your Credit card details here’ form, which (as a security conscious web user) was really something I didn’t want to do.
So I went into the support issues and added (https://github.com/codegl/tracegl/issues/38):
which was addressed 5 days later:
So now I’m happy click try this tool (for the price of a couple cups of coffee) using paypal’s website:
using my SI account:
I bought it, and downloaded the tracegs.js file
The legal terms have an interesting security caveat:
To start TraceGL take a look at the docs page which will give you a number of options:
Since I don’t have the code code the target website, I’m going to try the last option (‘Browser JS via proxy’)
For example to hook into Wikipedia you would use node tracegl http://en.wikipedia.org/
this will open a local server with the visualization UI on localhost:2000
and look something like this when working (the bug you see below is reported on this issue (I was able to get it working ok natively on OSx\))
Note that the target domain needs to support direct IP access, which in this case Wikipedia doesn’t:
Why the comment about the failure of Open Source model?
Because this is a javascript app (code is distributed as ‘the release’) which would benefit a lot from the code being open.
But, if it was open, would the TraceGL developer get the same amount of funds he/she gets now?
No, I don't think so. And with no clear path to ‘how to get revenue to pay for dedicated development time’, this is a good example of how in 2013 the OpenSource movement has not been able to create a financial model that allows this type of apps to be developed and maintained in an open way.
So what could be a model that could work? I have a couple ideas that I will try to blog about in the future :)
