Publish source code under free license, accept contributions.

[shortenjukebox]

I’ve been trying Trace for two months, and have been pretty impressed with it’s capabilities and performance across all my devices. That said, today, I was surprised to find Trace’s development is closed and contributions are not accepted. And I was disappointed to also see that three months have passed since the last commit, with mention that the author (though this is apparently temporary) isn’t maintaining it at present.

I really believe this extension has much potential, especially because it has wholly unique features like screen resolution randomization, navigator.hardwareConcurrency spoofing, and AudioContext fingerprinting protection that I haven’t yet seen in any other extension. So I dislike seeing the potential nullified when there is only one author, who understandably cannot devote all their time to developing Trace, and progress having stalled on fixing issues and developing features. I have seen so many great projects fail because the original author couldn’t support it anymore, and I would be saddened to see it happen to Trace.

So I would like to ask the author to publish the code under a free license. Though I personally can’t help with the development, I know that the open source and privacy communities would be very interested in helping develop Trace.

That is not to say I wish the author to no longer have a role. I only suggest letting others shoulder the burden of continual development, when the author cannot. A potentially less time-consuming maintenance capacity is even possible, leading and documenting the scope of Trace whenever time allows, and inviting others to help maintain.

If the concern is that the income made through Trace Premium would disappear, it doesn’t have to be the case. Platforms like Liberapay, Bountysource Salt, and Open Collective can distribute income fairly among contributors, with some going to the author to support expenses.

I’ll end it there, since I unexpectedly wrote longest issue ever. @jake-cryptic, hope you’ve been well, and I hope you consider my thoughts.

Thanks.
<3

[underrobyn]

I had a feeling that this issue would be raised at some point and I can understand the reasons for it being raised, for those who want the answer to this issue without reading the rest, no, I won't be allowing contributions in the near future; however that isn't to say that I won't allow them at some point later on as I'm not opposed to the idea, for the exact reasons you state.

Trace has been one of my favourite projects since I started writing it. I started developing it as a tool for me to use to learn about browser fingerprinting and develop my extension writing skills. As a result of this, most of the code in certain places is quite inefficient and hard to understand, this is one of the main reasons I don't want to allow contributions and also one of the reasons Trace was not open source at first. Through updates this is getting much better though and at this point I feel the only area that still has bad code is the options page.

Another reason, as you mention is the income that Trace generates. This is not a considerable amount and it stays in my Paypal until it is time to pay for server costs. I don't like to touch that money because of chargeback claims that can quickly happen, and this is a concern I would have with sharing the money that Trace makes.
For those who do not know what chargeback is, it is where a user goes to their bank instead of Paypal when they want a refund, this means the charge gets reversed and I get charged £14 GBP which is a large amount when you consider Trace premium costs only £3.29 GBP. This has happened quite a few times and there is not much I can do to prevent it, adding more complexity to this issue by changing the payment system is not something I really want to have to deal with right now.

Whilst I didn't update the extension in a few months, development has not been abandoned, I've recently changed a large amount of the code base to be easier to maintain. This combined with the development environment changes I've made recently have made working on Trace much easier and faster than before.

Of course, maintaining the website, updating the extension, doing research, testing, dealing with webstore issues etc is a lot for one person to handle and so I may look for additional help in the future, especially when I go to add more localisations to the extension.

Thank you for taking the time to write about your concerns, I think they are valid and will take them into account moving forward. For now though, Trace's development will continue as it has done, and I can confirm that a large update is coming very soon to Trace, it's currently in beta (available through Telegram). I hope I've been able to answer all your points.

Thank you :)