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Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license

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

#41

Post by onlydeadheroes »

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…

Sometimes, the only way to build something of a certain quality, is to remove all other stakeholders. Even if that means not having a business.

And sometimes, you really want to, just to prove yourself not all software has to be made out of layers of shit.

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

#44

Post by q3k »

lixtra wrote: post #12

I used hands on table (free) in an internal project. I would have had the budget to pay a license but the “N developer” option[1] was too confusing. We have interns and outsourcing partners potentially touching the code, how many licenses do I need? Negotiate an enterprise license? This would have involved legal department and dramatically increased cost and time to resolve. A “not more than 100 unique users per day”…

Agreed, seat-based licenses suck. Like, do you pay for developers that do code review but not necessarily touch this particular codebase? What happens when your company grows, or you get acquired?

Same for 'machine' (or even worse, 'cpu') based ones...

I don't know what a good number for cost scaling would be, if any. But what most companies offer right now is plainly terrible.

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

#45

Post by nullandvoid »

siscia wrote: post #31

As somebody trying to make a living out of open source software, I am really glad of this new movement. 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.

Whilst I certainly understand ( and mainly side with ) your point - to plays devils advocate would they?

Reading `samuelcolvin` comment on that thread made me think - mainly on point #4

" One definition of anti-social is "something that would break society if everyone did it". Take a minute to image a world where every successful software project made this move: node, webpack, react, angular, vue, bootstrap, python, rails, django, etc. etc. etc. - we've all decided to charge $2000/year - what would handsontable inc.'s toolchain or website cost? Would you have even learn to code? The software industry would look like the airline industry, the world would be a less fun place. "

I think they pose a good point - How is any hobbyist meant to get setup with a solid JS stack which involves 10's / hundreds of dependencies if you have to pay 10k/y+ licence fees before you have any paying customers? It actually feels like the opposite of progress as now only the big bugs can afford to set up shop with the best tech for their product.

Ultimately I think there's space for commercially available open source projects - the issue is the lack of companies / individuals giving back to sustain this movement.

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

#46

Post by Sphax »

eitland wrote: post #9

Understandable 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…

Caddy is still open source.

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

#47

Post by nickstefan12 »

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.

Nothing is particularly “bad”. I’ve used them in python a number of times.

I’m more just commenting that it’s a strange / interesting code based worth sight seeing. It was written in a style that seemed like from another language.

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

#48

Post by sokoloff »

Traster wrote: post #21
threeseed wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mone…

Related, search for free cheap and dear in this clsssus Spolsjy article:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

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

#49

Post by siscia »

nullandvoid wrote: post #45
siscia wrote: post #31

As somebody trying to make a living out of open source software, I am really glad of this new movement. 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.

Whilst I certainly understand ( and mainly side with ) your point - to plays devils advocate would they? Reading `samuelcolvin` comment on that thread made me think - mainly on point #4 " One definition of anti-social is "something that would break society if everyone did it". Take a minute to image a world where every successful software project made this move: node, webpack, react, angular, vue, bootstrap, python,…

I understand this point very well, but I believe we are way too far on the wrong side.

First of all I don't think is fair from software developer. We do real engineering and still we are not recognize as engineer. A transaction to a more rigours profession is good in my opinion and if that includes costs like receiving a degree or upfront buying expensive equipment, I am not so against it.

A product that is sold ensure maintenance and ongoing development which is very very needed with too many tools and libraries developed by amateurs that polutes the whole ecosystem.

Try to reverse your example, immagine the airline industry as it was the software one. Would it be more fun? Surely, we would have jetpacks, small private elicopters and everything will "move fast", but they will crush any other flights... Would it be better for the society? I doubt it.

Of course there is a reasonable middle ground!

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

#50

Post by anoncake »

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…

> 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.

There is a difference though: When contributing to open source, youre giving away your work to the public. When working excessive hours for a startup, your giving away your work to a for-profit company you dont own.

Though the difference isnt very big when your OSS product is mostly useful for companies anyway.

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