OSS Read-it-Later service Omnivore sells out to AI startup ElevenLabs
I've been a big fan of the slick interface of Omnivore. It could process web sites, email newsletters and RSS feeds.
The users have just been informed that Omnivore has "joined" the AI startup Eleven Labs. It may be bitter how OSS projects are being sucked up by AI, but that alone sounds innocuous enough.
What is upsetting is that the users have only until the 15.11 to export their data, after which the service will be deactivated. The export format is only usable with Eleven Labs, and exports for Pocket, Instapaper, etc are not offered, which I find just insulting.
Yeah... This was probably intentional. Now we get why ! They didn't put to much effort for the self-hosted version, because they didn't want you to self-host.
I second Wallabag — IMO "slick" is a nice-to-have, not a must-have when weighing software choices against each other.
At least Wallabag has a long and robust track record of not selling users out to bullshit tech corpos. That counts for more in my book than shiny surfaces.
So are they somehow able to relicense by buying off the contributors? Or does Eleven Labs intend to host/use something under AGPLv3? Just trying to figure out what their plan is and how they're dealing with it being open source
Everything that exists as it is now will remain open source. More than bought the developers seem to have been hired by eleven labs and most likely have been working there for a while, so they are actually taking their know how and experience there more than taking the code itself.
That's how it looks like to me.
Another possibility is that the eleven labs reading app has portions licensed as agpl, the ones taken from omnivore.
They have their own reader app focused on their voice technology. Probably the plan is expand it to a read-it-later app similar to what omnivore is, and charge a subscription for ir. Similar to readwise but more focused on voice, I would think that's the plan.
Remember that so far nobody is making money with "AI" other than NVIDIA so they are starting to do these far out or whacky pivots to seek monetization.
Stumbled upon it not too long ago but hadn’t yet determined it important enough for me to use yet. But I can see the tech stack looks like something I could get back into. If a fork starts I might finally move my lazy ass to do a PR here or review there. I’ll keep an eye out on it