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Wappalyzer no longer open source?

21 points by gorenb ↗ HN
NPM says wappalyzer is deprecated: https://www.npmjs.com/package/wappalyzer

The Github repo doesn’t exist: https://github.com/wappalyzer/wappalyzer

26 comments

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evv
Actually I didn't know it used to be open source!

I think they make money by selling data harvested through the extension. So you might be able to pay them to answer "how many websites are using X library/framework"?

blogornot
I have a mirror of the repository but the last update was in October 29 of 2022. Does anyone have a more recent mirror?
sneakernets
I posted the most recent mirror possible a little further up this thread. Hopefully it works for you. Not sure what other repos it might require which are also gone, but it's something.
blogornot
Got it.. I pulled latest. I had to switch from master to main, but it worked! Thanks!
sneakernets
Looks like someone managed to grab a full copy right before the repo was yanked: https://github.com/dochne/wappalyzer

Last commit was 15 hours ago. This was very recent.

processunknown
Are there any legal impact of closing the source code considering people have contributed to this project and they are very likely using those contributions?
klaaz0r
I think they changed the license a little while back to GPL v3?
gorenb
I should note that the company was private about this, and didn’t mention it anywhere. Someone asked what they’re selling, which I couldn’t respond to since it’s dead, but they’re trying to sell an API, which is basically what was open source but it requires internet and costs money.
klaaz0r
From a business perspective I understand closing it but building OSS and taking it private does feel a little weird?
KRAKRISMOTT
It's a web scraping tool that requires constant daily maintenance. I don't think they get enough third party contributors to justify keeping it open source. I bet most users are just there to raise issues whenever something breaks.
klaaz0r
Looking at the git history they did get decent amount of contributions

they are of course completely free todo this but it does feel a little like profit from OSS and take it private once you have enough

PeterisP
They're not "of course completely free todo this" unless they have permission or copyright transfer from every single contributor. They don't solely own full copyright to the combined product, they have been licensed these contributions under GPL, if they want to distribute the combined product (their own code + contributions) they either have to follow the licence conditions or it's a copyright violation.
klaaz0r
For any one interested here is a fork of the last commit (not my GH): https://github.com/dochne/wappalyzer

It feels a bit odd to benefit from open source and than make it private, of course the author is allowed to do that but it does make me cautious about other OSS projects that are getting funding now

yasher
The owner of the project change it to private and discontinued because he want to monetize it.

I read today that a company will follow the project almos the "techonoly" files, that is the more difficult to mantain. https://github.com/enthec/webappanalyzer

osbre
I have a copy of it from 11th of July, since I used to contibute.

https://github.com/osbre/wappalyzer (with the original commit history)

Weird and sad to see this extension go private, it was recieving a lot of contributions on GitHub.