09 - Editions of Chamber
In an ideal world, people who work selflessly and give away gifts for free would be loved AND REWARDED. And yet, most open source projects, even some that are cornerstones of modern world keep asking for money, just for survival. Every end of the year (whichever date they count their year from), most project put up banners requesting for donations. That almost feels like begging. I have, time and again donated to a few. Wikipedia and Firefox were two projects that I donated to frequently (though other biggies also donate to them and I should have donated to some other project maybe) and yet I always felt small. If I could, I would have given more.
When I started building Chamber, I too wanted to give away everything for free. Sadly, free does not get the value it should, not in my eyes anyway. So it was imperative to me that I should also do something around my passion that could put food on the table. That is one of the reasons I am building Chamber Advanced.
Chamber Advanced shall be a closed-source edition of Chamber and shall contain more features, shall be more tested, and will be under a paid model. However there are two points that I want to make about the payment and how it connects to the free/open version:
- Chamber Advanced will be payable in either “Pay by money” or “Pay in kind” model. The “actions” against the “Pay in kind” model are not yet decided though. However, rest assured, I am not going to ask anyone to click ads on my or my friend’s website, or ask you to sign up for some Crypto scam or something like that.
- As the Advanced edition gets more features, some of those shall trickle down to the open version. I do not want to make users of the open version feel like I am abandoning the open version. I also don’t want to betray my inner voice and open source community at the same time.
Features
Following are the features that are built and planned for the two editions so far. Any of features built in future for Advanced edition can be trickled down to the Open/Free edition; hence, any No mentioned against the free version does not mean that it will never be built, it only means that it has not been copied over from the Advanced edition to the Open one.
It is worth a note however that which features will be built first and when they will trickle down is not yet planned.
Note: When reading the table below, at most of the places, where we mention files, we mean files and folders.
| Feature | Open/Free | Advanced |
|---|---|---|
| Cross-Platform | Yes | Yes |
| Responsive Web-UI | Yes | Yes |
| Self-Hostable | Yes | Yes |
| CLI | Yes | Yes |
| Portable Chamberfile | Yes | Yes |
| Upload Files and Folders (Web UI) | Yes | Yes |
| Download Files and Folders (Web UI) | Yes | Yes |
| Delete Files | Yes | Yes |
| Encrypt File names within Chamberfile | No | In Progress |
| Encrypt File hashes within Chamberfile | No | In Progress |
| Rename Files | No | Planned |
| Create new Folder | No | Planned |
| Prevent creation of new Chamberfile in Web UI |
No | Planned |
| File preview for images in Web UI | No | Planned |
| Star a file | No | Planned |
| Put tags on files | No | Planned |
| Splittable Vault | No | Planned |
| Mounting Chamber as a File System | No | Planned |
There are a lot more features which are planned. I shall be adding them and updating this page later.