As the author of Little Snitch for Linux, I can tell you what drives us: we are a small company where people (not investors) make the decisions. It was a personal choice of mine, driven by a gut feeling. I'm curious about the outcome...

As a paying customer, I wasn't expecting this so thank you! Can you expand more on your gut feeling? Also, I have different security expectations on Linux vs MacOS. Would you ever consider open sourcing the daemon?

It's hard to expand on the gut feeling. I wanted to have the app myself. Adding licensing to the code, limiting functionality for a demo mode, and then wait whether Linux users would pay for it just did not feel right.

Regarding daemon open source: The future is hard to predict, even more with AI being just invented. I would love to make it open source, but if you can feed it into Claude and tell it to convert it to a Mac version, we could lose our income.

For the moment, we prefer to keep it closed because we cannot estimate the consequences of making it open source.

The Wikipedia page for Little Snitch indicates that it's written in Objective-C. Is that still the case? Before going with the new implementation, did you attempt (or consider) to port the current codebase (using e.g. Cocotron or GNUStep libraries)? If so, how good or bad of an experience was that?

Why is Little Snitch for Linux™ so hard to find from the company homepage[1] and the product page from the legacy app[2]?

Did the fact that you knew it was going to be made partially open source factor into your decision to develop a new, JS-and-DOM-based UI rather than having build targets for a shared, cross-platform codebase? (E.g. so that you wouldn't end up disclosing the source for the proprietary Mac version?)

1. <https://obdev.at/index.html>

2. <https://obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html>

Intentionally not edited to add:

Why are you using minified dependencies (like uPlot.iife.min.js[1] and uPlot.min.css[2]) for a desktop application—a nominally open source, security-sensitive application?

uPlot is also open source (released by Sorokin under MIT), but why aren't you following the terms of its license[3]?

1. <https://github.com/obdev/littlesnitch-linux/blob/main/webroo...>

2. <https://github.com/obdev/littlesnitch-linux/blob/main/webroo...>

3. <https://github.com/leeoniya/uPlot/blob/master/LICENSE>

Sorry, I overlooked that. I actually checked the license only to the point whether we can include it without other obligations and then downloaded what was offered as a download on either the web site or github, can't remember. I decided for the minified version because it's smaller. That's the purpose of minification, after all.

It's somewhat strange that they require the license to be reproduced in every copy, but then offer a download without it. But anyway, I'll prepend the license to the next public release.

Thanks for pointing that out!

> I decided for the minified version because it's smaller. That's the purpose of minification, after all.

Mm... the purpose of minification, when it's not (also) being used for obfuscation purposes, is tied directly to the execution model of Web apps—constraints that don't apply for desktop applications (even if they are implemented in e.g. the same programming language or using the same or a similar runtime).

App makers and browser extension developers who shoehorn all of the (frankly already very bad or at least questionable) "best practices" associated with the tooling that was created to deal with creating/maintaining/delivering SPAs and other browser-based products into applications loaded from disk are just fundamentally not thinking things through.

For a security-sensitive application like this one, where a show of nothing-up-the-sleeve is only a benefit, one should expect there to be _no_ minified blobs in use.

I'll post in our blog about the development background later. The Linux version shares no code with the Mac version. Only concepts. It's written in Rust and JavaScript (for the Web UI).

Our site is primarily aimed at Mac users, and most visitors skim rather than read carefully. If the Linux package were more prominent, Mac users would likely click it, struggle to install it, and blame us for the confusion.

And regarding your third question: No. The decision was made when I wanted to run it on our headless servers.

Many from linux crowd are slightly paranoid and ideological.

I'm as a linux user very reluctant to install anything proprietary that has such sensitive info as my network traffic and would rather use opensnitch or any other foss fork.

The same time I don't mind to pay for open-source, I donate several thousands USD per year to FOSS projects. But I guess I'm in a minority here and if you make the whole stack open-source you're not going to make many sells really.

> Many from linux crowd are slightly paranoid

Slightly? There are quite a few tin foil hat comments on this submission.

Well, it's all relative and depends on perception.

I tried to briefly explain a typical i-own-my-computer mindset regarding the linux monetization question from the parent comment.

I can pay for cool stuff I can trust, but the "I can trust" part is very tricky.

You call it paranoia, I call it zero tolerance for enshitification.

It's like the Nazi bar problem. You need to be vigilant to prevent the thing you rely on becoming yet another platform for Microsoft to exfil your personal data to NSA servers.

> There are quite a few tin foil hat comments on this submission

Everybody says this until they get fucking pwned at work or have their own data or children's data taken and used.

Then it's "not so tin-foily" and maybe it changed your entire life.

You're either paranoid, or a fool at this point.

The author talks about his motivation right here: https://www.obdev.at/blog/little-snitch-for-linux/

It's not that arcane.

When OpenSnitch already exists and is free and open source, a paid tool that does essentially the same thing with a slightly different (perhaps more polished) UI would be quite a hard sell.

Both for the obvious cost reason, but also because manu of us don't like having code ok our computers we can't inspect, especially not in privileged positions like a firewall is. I.e. I don't care much if a game or the Spotify app is closed source, but neither of those run privileged, in fact I run them sandboxed (Flatpak).