Certainly the plan. Just a matter of priorities and time. I'm curious, what's so attractive about self hosted version?
In fact, I think that's a valid answer to the question posed by the headline. Returning the power to the end user, and keeping it there, should be the most important priority for software developers. This is a social problem, not an engineering problem, but unlike many other social problems the solution will have to be engineering-driven.
In more concrete terms, that means being able to self-host your tools.
I heartily agree. There are so many new tools and things that are interesting concepts, that I don't try because there is no offline/self-hosted version available.
Current example (but can be replaced by a myriad of other tools, this is not specific to 'em): Notion. Apparently could be adopted into my personal knowledge management, has some interesting features most of the software I've seen so far does not, but why would I ever invest even a moment of time to pay the costs of using the system (let alone the membership fees etc.) if one day, poof, it's gone, like Frank Sinatra, like WiiWare, like Microsoft eBooks, like Google Reader.
> Returning the power to the end user, and keeping it there, should be the most important priority for software developers.
This is what we need to return to. Look at the open-source manifestos, FSF documents, heck even certain sections in the Windows 9x User interface guides and .NET Framework design guidelines indicate that the user should always be the focus, the user should be the one in control.
Though I'm glad for the flexibility it will offer you...that doesn't seem like an awesome idea/trend.
I'll take a deeper look.
Check out our community as well, lots of hackers, especially young ones, sharing and collaborating on code: https://repl.it/talk
Simon -- since you're the cocreator of Django, you might get a kick out of this: From loading up a Django environment to adding and rendering the first view takes less than a minute: https://gifs.amasad.repl.co/django.gif
Before starting this company I was a founding engineer on the React Native team where I focused speed of setting up and taking the drudgery out of cross-platform mobile dev. And before that I was a founding engineer at Codecademy where we were attacking the same problem from an education angle.
With Repl.it, however, we're determined to simultaneously solve the "getting started" problem while scaling the environment to allow real work. It's incredibly challenging but we've made great progress. If anyone is interested in working with us, collaborating, or if you're simply passionate about this problem and want to chat then I'd love to hear from you: [email protected]