Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license • Hacker News Board

Re: Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license

#21

Post by Traster » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 8:44 AM UTC

threeseed wrote: post #11

sheetjs wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 av…

Most people simply don't understand how enterprise companies work. You think you have plenty of money to spend and it's easy to get licenses for software. Nope. It's often harder than being in a small business. Licenses often mean lengthy RFPs with extensive Legal and Procurement involvement. Need to try and sneak things under the radar if you want to get them to buy your products.

This is a good point. To add some colour to this. In my experience it's not that there's no money to spend. There's tonnes of money to spend, but there's also tonnes of people to spend it. The result is within the company you develop experts, people who know how to get access to the budget. Every year those experts spend a non-trivial amount of time making sure they get the company's budget. They spend tonnes of money, whilst the average employee never sees any cash in their entire tenure.

So in some ways it makes sense to make your enterprise price incredibly high - because the people within large companies will either be able to spend loads of money, or non at all. Very few will be anywhere in between (and will find it very difficult to pay or continue to pay over time).

Re: Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license

#22

Post by grumpydba » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 9:07 AM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #18

Great to hear. It's painful to watch so many good developers giving away their best work for free, because they feel it's somehow their duty to do so. It's the same feeling I get watching fresh graduates working 100 hour weeks for these startups because there's free food and everybody else is doing it. You want to help, but the culture is just so well geared towards attracting new kids to exploit and convincing them…

> The things you build have value. They're making other people billions of dollars. Charge accordingly.

html and js tables are a commodity which does not make billions of dollars. They will be forked into oblivion. I think they overestimate the value of their product a little bit. Wish them good luck though.

Re: Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license

#23

Post by Drakim » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 9:23 AM UTC

arcturus17 wrote: post #14

nickstefan12 wrote: post #13

I will never forget what I found when hacking the internals of Handsontable many years ago... JavaScript For loops with - :label (eg go to) - continue - break It was definitely an interesting sperlunk!

What’s so bad about continue and break? I’ve seen it in different languages in what I consider great projects... Sometimes you really need an exit in the middle of the loop.

Worst part is, I've seen devs wrap their entire for-loop in an anonymous function JUST so they could use a return; to break out of the loop, instead of using break;

Re: Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license

#24

Post by usrusr » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 9:26 AM UTC

sheetjs wrote: post #10

lazerwalker wrote: post #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?

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 av…

> To "increase the conversion rate" you have to either improve the value of the commercial offering or cripple / remove the open source offering.

I'm not even sure if that would have much influence: the line between paying and non-paying might be just the divide between companies where it's hard to get paid licencing approved and companies where it's hard to get unpaid licensing approved. The key to a high commercial open source conversion rate might be targeting industries where lingering distrust of open source is still common.

Re: Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license

#25

Post by ioulian » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 9:29 AM UTC

grumpydba wrote: post #22

jasonkester wrote: post #18

Great to hear. It's painful to watch so many good developers giving away their best work for free, because they feel it's somehow their duty to do so. It's the same feeling I get watching fresh graduates working 100 hour weeks for these startups because there's free food and everybody else is doing it. You want to help, but the culture is just so well geared towards attracting new kids to exploit and convincing them…

> The things you build have value. They're making other people billions of dollars. Charge accordingly. html and js tables are a commodity which does not make billions of dollars. They will be forked into oblivion. I think they overestimate the value of their product a little bit. Wish them good luck though.

The amount of functionality does not compare to other table/grid frameworks. This library is not "just a JS plugin for tables", it can do a lot of things. If you try to rewrite it yourself you'll need a lot of man-days to do that.

On the other note:

What if you fork that repo and change something small, can you use it for commercial purposes? Or is it stated that any modification MUST use the same license, and you must pay the original creators?

Re: Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license

#26

Post by testrun » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 9:36 AM UTC

sheetjs wrote: post #10

lazerwalker wrote: post #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?

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 av…

One thing that might help is to have pricing front and centre.

Re: Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license

#27

Post by TAForObvReasons » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 9:49 AM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #18

Great to hear. It's painful to watch so many good developers giving away their best work for free, because they feel it's somehow their duty to do so. It's the same feeling I get watching fresh graduates working 100 hour weeks for these startups because there's free food and everybody else is doing it. You want to help, but the culture is just so well geared towards attracting new kids to exploit and convincing them…

This announcement is about Handsontable completely shutting down the open source offering and using the same distribution channels to pump proprietary software. Wheres a month ago https://github.com/handsontable/handsontable/ had open source code, now it is all proprietary. That's not something to celebrate.

As pointed out in the github discussion, Elastic did the same thing with Elasticsearch, and that contributed to AWS forking the project: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-...

The same exact issue applies here:

> The maintainers of open source projects have the responsibility of keeping the source distribution open to everyone and not changing the rules midstream

> we believe that maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure that the primary open source distribution remains open and free of proprietary code

Those comments aren't an indictment of the open core business model or of attempts to monetize open source, but rather a criticism of "muddying the waters" and trying to create licensing confusion.

Re: Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license

#28

Post by dagw » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 9:49 AM UTC

testrun wrote: post #26

sheetjs wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 av…

One thing that might help is to have pricing front and centre.

Honestly depends on the price and the type of customer you are after. On a personal level I agree with you and when I worked at smaller companies with tighter budgets no price meant no sales. However with enterprise level sales price is almost never the stumbling block, having a sales team that can customize the offer to fit into your particular companies sales process is what makes or breaks a deal.

Re: Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license

#29

Post by amelius » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 9:54 AM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #18

Great to hear. It's painful to watch so many good developers giving away their best work for free, because they feel it's somehow their duty to do so. It's the same feeling I get watching fresh graduates working 100 hour weeks for these startups because there's free food and everybody else is doing it. You want to help, but the culture is just so well geared towards attracting new kids to exploit and convincing them…

The situation will only grow as more and more people become programming-literate in Asia.

Re: Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license

#30

Post by mrighele » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 10:23 AM UTC

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #27

jasonkester wrote: post #18

Great to hear. It's painful to watch so many good developers giving away their best work for free, because they feel it's somehow their duty to do so. It's the same feeling I get watching fresh graduates working 100 hour weeks for these startups because there's free food and everybody else is doing it. You want to help, but the culture is just so well geared towards attracting new kids to exploit and convincing them…

This announcement is about Handsontable completely shutting down the open source offering and using the same distribution channels to pump proprietary software . Wheres a month ago https://github.com/handsontable/handsontable/ had open source code, now it is all proprietary. That's not something to celebrate. As pointed out in the github discussion, Elastic did the same thing with Elasticsearch, and that contributed…

> The maintainers of open source projects have the responsibility of keeping the source distribution open to everyone and not changing the rules midstream

> we believe that maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure that the primary open source distribution remains open and free of proprietary code

I disagree. Nobody has the responsibility to do anything for free. Amazon is free to take that responsibility for itself though.

The fact that this comes from a company that in more than one case has modified an open source project and kept the changes hidden behind a SaaS only adds insult to injury.