I'm assuming the people who are asking for Orion to be open source are not paying for it.

I think a blog post on Orion's transparency is enough. The fact that there is Orion+ is enough to warrant no need to have tracking or 'enshittification'.

If you like Kagi and Orion, supporting development by paying for it makes sense.

Open sourcing everything of Orion means that Orion+ will be open source which defeats the point of supporting development of Orion directly.

I've seen projects start open source, change to closed source and then add in the enshittification later. It doesn't matter if the code is 'open' the source code would eventually be unmaintained and have security holes which there is no time in the world for anyone else to maintain.

> I'm assuming the people who are asking for Orion to be open source are not paying for it.

I think this is an odd/slightly-disingenuous statement.

I mean, I'm on linux, so I'm not, I'm happily paying for kagi though, and would pay for Orion+ if it was available to me :)

I would also very much like it if Orion was open source, it would make me feel a lot better committing to and recommending a browser if I had actual assurances it's behaving appropriately, beyond a company saying "trust me", no matter how nice/cool they seem at the time.

Honestly, I kinda wish Orion+ was the only option, I think having a free option (and the incentives that can create) is kind of antithetical to Kagi's whole raison detre.