2026-10-06 | Open-source/product boundary lesson from Horilla and local-app exploration. When building proprietary value around an LGPL or otherwise copyleft base, do not assume secrecy in modifications is the moat. Keep the legal boundary clean: preserve the upstream licence rights and place proprietary differentiation in separate APIs/services, integrations, operational know-how, brand and support where possible. More broadly, for desktop/local products prefer the smallest deployable architecture that serves the use case rather than bundling an entire server stack: reuse a native shell/client and local sidecars where practical, and omit infrastructure such as search, queues or workers until the product actually needs them.