It’s complicated to build, maintain and monetize a launcher. I’d love to see them develop Nova completely as a true open source project, but I also understand that might not fit their business. I think the community would be happy to see just a code drop of Nova 8.1 as open source.
I already completed the prep work for this. Cleaning the code, removing some dependencies, stripping API keys, etc. Branch legal approved it, and I’m sure Instabridge legal just reviewed everything for the acquisition. The heavy lifting is done. They just need to make a decision. The time to do it is also now. Nova 8.1 is already a bit dated, so users will be eager to see what they can do with Nova 9. But until they make an open source release of Nova, that is going to dominate the community discussion.
Even if Nova 9 remained closed source, this would show the community that Nova is in the right hands after all this uncertainty. It sounds like they’re confident in their vision for Nova, so open sourcing 8.1 wouldn’t be a threat. And it would go a really long way with the community.
