Proton said the Standard Notes app, which is available for both mobile and desktop, will remain “open source, freely available and fully supported”.
It also suggested that there will be no change to Standard Notes’ prices; its press release specifies that existing five-year subscriptions “will continue to be honored.”
“Standard Notes will remain an independent product and in due course both companies will open access to their products to each others’ users,” Proton added.
A “privacy” company acquiring and centralizing various projects to be under its umbrella seems kind of worrisome to me even if it’s done with pure intentions.
I find that fair, but at the same time, proton has a rocksolid history at this point. OFC they will likely add their features to it, and maybe remove some. But im the end its still open source and under gpl licence, so its not like proton cam change that unless they remove all other commits.
Chromium is still open source, as is Android to some extent. I get that the two companies (Google and Proton) are in completely different size classes, but something being open source doesn’t necessarily mean it stays healthy. Sure people can fork it, but the issue tends to lie in continuous maintenance by volunteers against continuous maintenance by a large company that’s constantly adding in anti-features along with desired ones.
I’m not necessarily saying Proton will go down that route, but trying to become big and bundled as a value proposition opens the door for that behavior once they get enough people locked into the ecosystem.