Good note by @brb@feddit.nl is what kind of license they use:
While our core solutions, the infrastructure protocol any-sync, and the data protocol any-block, are released as open source under the permissive MIT license, we distribute the remaining layers, including the middleware library any-heart, and applications like anytype-js, anytype-swift, and anytype-kotlin, under the Any Source Available License. This license grants individuals the freedom to review, modify, and utilize the code for personal, academic, scientific, research, and development purposes. However, for commercial use, consent from the Any Association is required.
This way, we guarantee everyone the right to use, modify, and distribute the data exchange protocol and the data format, ensuring that anyone is free to create any application on top of them. We guarantee free, non-commercial usage of the software and full transparency of the code. However, considering the substantial R&D resources required for the application layer, we believe that businesses and networks utilizing our software for commercial purposes should contribute towards its ongoing development, allowing maintainers to support and enhance the platform.
The Any Association, based in Zug, Switzerland, is an organization that will govern the rights to use the software and will provide an opportunity for other significant contributors to join a sort of digital cooperative and become the governors of the software as well. This empowers significant contributors to co-decide the next steps of product development and protects them from rivalsβ abuse.
https://blog.anytype.io/our-open-philosophy/
https://github.com/anyproto/anytype-ts/blob/main/LICENSE.md
There is also another 'open source alternative to Notion' project called AppFlowy, which uses a AGPL-3.0 license. I will try to post about that project once I get more familiar with it
That still doesn't explain it. I don't know what Notion is.
Part of the problem is that I don't know the extent of what people might use this kind of tool for. It's a productivity tool that has docs, calendars, databases, and other tools, but people use it in very different ways. Some people use it for documentation, some use it for course notes / planning, some use it to make dashboards, etc.
There's probably a better way to describe it that I'm not thinking of, so I might recommend checking out the website above until someone else comes along to give a better explanation.
Here's how Wikipedia describes Notion
Anytype meanwhile is a newer open source and self hosted alternative to the above. Better for privacy etc. There's another open source project with a similar purpose called AppFlowy
So basically an office suite? Like Google Docs or MS Office?
You can probably use it to do similar things, but it's a different format. Everything exists in one place, so you're not using it to open and save files externally (but you might be able to export individual pages as markdown).
For example, this post today is announcing that they have implemented collaboration. Until now, people would have been using it individually for personal notes and project management.
The main function I like is being able to make objects with custom fields, which I can then add information to and sort. I haven't used it extensively yet, but I have friends that use Notion for quite a bit
Ah I see. Thanks for clarifying.
It just sounds like an old school operating system, like OS/2.