31–40 of 77 posts
I predict that eventually we will see more and more projects following the same route and try to monetize their products and it will become much more normal, companies will get used to it and eventually everybody will be better off.
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…
Noncommercial licenses (for software or content in general) are especially problematic, because there's no easily-ascertained notion of whether some use counts as "commercial" or not! These kinds of shenanigans are why so much useful software got lost in the 1980s and 1990s microcomputers era (despite being made widely available at some point), and that's exactly what the FLOSS and open-content movement strive to fix - we don't want something like that to happen again.
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…
- as I mentioned before the fact that they were actual open source compared to some of their competitors heavily the decision of the team I was on at that time to go with their commercial package. That advantage is gone now.
- I have spent a few hours voluntarily helping in debugging and following up a couple of issues because it was open source and I was helping us and everyone else.
- They might have gotten of the hook a bit easier a couple of times (bugs, half a year of delays) than if they'd been commercial.
I don't know, I thought many people here would do the same but I don't know so I cannot say how much goodwill they are losing.
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.
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> 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 mu…
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 only way I see to get money out of someone for a product like Handsontable, while maintaining an open souruce version is by withholding some features + extended support. That's what they've been doing and they've said it hasn't been bringing in the return they need.
In Elastic's case, they have a product that is easy to monetize while keeping an open source version: you offer your product as a (hosted) service + extended support, so if people don't want to deal with setting it up themselves, they pay you. Docker seems to be a good example of this. The open source version is still fully availiable and can be used however you like, but comes without that extra support (and maybe a few features).
Instead, Elastic has stuck a bunch of proprietary code on Github, seemingly to bait people into use it, when they're not allowed to. Handsontable aren't doing anything like that. Once they go proprietary, they're archiving the repo. It's still there if people want to use it, but it's not being maintained. That's really no different to any other random piece of abandoned code on Github (of which there is plenty).
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…
Well: - as I mentioned before the fact that they were actual open source compared to some of their competitors heavily the decision of the team I was on at that time to go with their commercial package. That advantage is gone now. - I have spent a few hours voluntarily helping in debugging and following up a couple of issues because it was open source and I was helping us and everyone else. - They might have gotten o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 me, Handsontable's position is much more understandable than Elastic's, because Elastic could (and do) monetize as a service. That's not really practical for Handsontable. The only way I see to get money out of someone for a product like Handsontable, while maintaining an open souruce version is by withholding some features + extended support. That's what they've been doing and they've said it hasn't been bringing…
That's not true, last month https://github.com/handsontable/handsontable/ was MIT licensed, today it is proprietary. Handsontable is attempting the same sort of "baiting" that Elastic did. There is no evidence they are archiving the old repo, and in fact they are archiving the proprietary repo and merging it into the open source one:
> The Handsontable Pro package on NPM is marked as deprecated and the repository on GitHub is archived (made read-only)
Interesting. 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?
After having worked with DataTables, ag-Grid and having evaluated a couple of others I'd say that ag-Grid Enterprise is the best general purpose grid library at the moment.
Only for the use case where you really need exactly some kind of Excel look-alike/Excel web viewer, Handsontable Pro or SpreadJS will probably be better for you, as ag-Grid does not really offer a finished solution here and also misses a couple of minor features at the moment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well: - as I mentioned before the fact that they were actual open source compared to some of their competitors heavily the decision of the team I was on at that time to go with their commercial package. That advantage is gone now. - I have spent a few hours voluntarily helping in debugging and following up a couple of issues because it was open source and I was helping us and everyone else. - They might have gotten o…
FWIW their "largest competitor" ag-grid still has an open source version available: https://github.com/ag-grid/ag-grid They neatly separated the proprietary parts in https://github.com/ag-grid/ag-grid-enterprise