Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license
1–10 of 77 posts
Re: Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license
#2Interesting. This reminds me a fair bit of ag-Grid but I've never heard of it. Is there some comparison somewhere of how all these data tables libraries stack up?
Re: Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license
#3Interesting. This reminds me a fair bit of ag-Grid but I've never heard of it. Is there some comparison somewhere of how all these data tables libraries stack up?
From a business perspective, ag-Grid seems like the most successful / popular solution. They've donated $47500 to webpack https://opencollective.com/webpack#contributors which is really impressive!
Re: Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license
#4"Essentially, [Handsontable] was kept running thanks to the money earned from Handsontable Pro. Unfortunately, our observation is that the ratio of commercial to free users is about 1 to 25. Hence, the only way for us to keep investing in the product is to convert more free users into paying."
This license change can play out in three ways: (1) free users convert to paying users, (2) free users move to other products with more liberal licenses, (3) combination of (1) and (2).
Re: Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license
#5"Essentially, [Handsontable] was kept running thanks to the money earned from Handsontable Pro. Unfortunately, our observation is that the ratio of commercial to free users is about 1 to 25. Hence, the only way for us to keep investing in the product is to convert more free users into paying." This license change can play out in three ways: (1) free users convert to paying users, (2) free users move to other products…
(3) free users stick with the latest MIT-licensed version
(4) free users fork the free version, like what AWS did with Elasticsearch https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/
Re: Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license
#6Interesting. This reminds me a fair bit of ag-Grid but I've never heard of it. Is there some comparison somewhere of how all these data tables libraries stack up?
From a business perspective, ag-Grid seems like the most successful / popular solution. They've donated $47500 to webpack https://opencollective.com/webpack#contributors which is really impressive!
Yeah, a place I worked for decided to license agGrid because it was simply the best solution we could find. The React integration was still a bit rough but it did deliver pretty well on the promised features and performance was pretty good too. I imagine a lot of the solutions today are pretty good, but it's been a long time since I've been looking at any of this stuff.
Re: Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license
#7Didn't even know about this but there are plenty of alternatives out there.
Re: Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license
#8> Unfortunately, our observation is that the ratio of commercial to free users is about 1 to 25.
That's a ~4% conversion rate. Anyone have data for any similar OSS software libraries with a free tier?
Re: Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license
#9Understandable but a bit disappointing, just like Caddy.
With Caddy I'm fairly certain I donated (as did others, including Mozilla). I guess my contribution didn't mean much but it still felt weird.
With Handsontable we recommended it at a project and made sure to get commercial licenses - because it was open source.
That said, when I recommend open source at work it is not because of the price but because of peace of mind it gives.
Re: Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license
#10> Unfortunately, our observation is that the ratio of commercial to free users is about 1 to 25. That's a ~4% conversion rate. Anyone have data for any similar OSS software libraries with a free tier?
We ( https://sheetjs.com/ ) started from a series of open source projects (our largest https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx has more than 15K stars) and offer a slew of related solutions, including more advanced builds of our open source offerings as well as complementary software.
The ratio of customers to open source users is largely useless. To "convert" users, you need to offer something above and beyond what is available in the open source offering. Unless you have something compelling, people won't "convert" out of altruistic desires. Unfortunately that's not how business works. We found many companies deciding to fork our open source libraries before even considering contacting us (for example, the John Deere homepage https://www.deere.com/en/ uses a forked version of our open source offering)
To "increase the conversion rate" you have to either improve the value of the commercial offering or cripple / remove the open source offering. They seem to be doing the latter.