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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

#61

Post by astazangasta »

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…

Scientists and inventors routinely have their work appropriated and turned into profit for the ruling class. This is essentially what the pharmaceutical industry is. The answer to this is not "make sure to get yours, too", it is to prevent the possibility of accumulation based on your work by ensuring its value belongs to everyone.

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

#63

Post by mcguire »

kelnage wrote: post #53
dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #51

> The MIT license is replaced with a custom, ‘free for non-commercial and evaluation’ license This is really all I want out of anything. I don’t want to pay to evaluate, just to see if it’s a good fit. But if I’m going to use something commercially, I actually want to pay for it, at least if that thing is a complicated component like a rich text editor or handsontable. These open source projects usually have 1-2 deve…

Because commercial software companies never die (and take their IP down with them)? And are you seriously advocating that a lack of knowledge about a factor you have identified as being important (most commercial companies rarely tell you how many developers account for the majority of the code changes) is somehow beneficial to you, compared to actually knowing?

Remember, this is web front end stuff. No one is going to use the same components twice, and if someone says something has to be fixed, a new team of developers and a complete rewrite is to be expected.

Cynically yours,

mcguire

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

#64

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

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,…

> The software industry would look like the airline industry, the world would be a less fun place.

Yes, but the point is that the airline/aerospace industry exists, as do many other industries and profession that require expensive tooling. Heck, the software industry existed and produced a variety of successful products in the late '70s to early '90s before FOSS started taking off.

Paying for tools is not an insurmountable obstacle.

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

#65

Post by cr0sh »

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.

This is the thing about the GPL license (in general):

The thing I made has value - here is my code; use it, enjoy it, as you see fit. If you make changes to it that you distribute, then as payment for the value of my code, you pay me (and the community) in code.

That's the basic monetary transaction of GPL, at least as I see it. I write code, you pay for it in code. Hopefully your code has as much value as my code, but that's a chance I take (there's also a great possibility your code has -more- value than my code; ideally you'd see this as an overall increase in the value of the code as a whole for the future - kinda like rising stock value, or maybe interest gains?).

No - code will not feed my family nor pay for my home, etc. Which is why I have a standard day job.

But if I write something in code that I ask for code in return as payment, why not?

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

#66

Post by WorldMaker »

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.

Certainly you can easily jump to "100%" conversion rate by dropping an open source offering so there's no conversion to rate, but never forget that conversion rate is a bad metric to optimize in this case. You can have a very high conversion rate of a very low number of users very easily, and that doesn't mean you get paid more at the end of the day, though.

Removing/crippling an open source offering can backfire in simple and obvious ways such as killing community goodwill, or crippling any conversion rate momentum you have in existing marketing efforts and conversion paths. It can be a quick way to shrink your entire audience for the project.

So yes, the ratio of customers to open source users is largely useless, but I'd say more for the same reason that any ratio metric fails to account for magnitudes of scale, rather than necessarily blaming individual users on either side of the "conversion fence".

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

#67

Post by Reinmar »

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?

It was even worse for CKEditor:

> From these thousands of businesses and millions of downloads, a very small group (less than 0,5%) decides to enter into business relations with CKSource.

Source: https://github.com/ckeditor/ckeditor5/issues/991

However, the difference is that all CKEditor 4's plugins were open sourced and licensed under a permissive set of GPL2+/LGPL/MPL licenses. So the project was funded by a combination of support, SLAs and commercial licenses.

With CKEditor 5 (a completely new project) we chose GPL2+. I will be able to tell you how it worked for us in a couple of years

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

#68

Post by Reinmar »

kelnage wrote: post #57
dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because commercial software companies never die. I wasn't clear. I wasn't comparing to commercial companies. I basically don't use commercial software because I'd rather have to code features myself than depend on somebody for documentation. Depending on someone for documentation (ie. having to reverse engineer something you paid for!) is one of the worst feelings in the world. Commercial open source is the best of…

Okay, I can see what you're getting at. I'm still not convinced that this move is the right way to go about it, as compared to simply keeping an FOSS license and setting up consultancy payments or similar (as they had previously) - as others point out, the commercial licenses can be a serious pain to navigate in many companies, that can significantly reduce the benefit your product offers.

Which FOSS license? Because if it's a permissive one, like MIT, BSD or MPL, then you get results like we did with CKEditor 4:

> From these thousands of businesses and millions of downloads, a very small group (less than 0,5%) decides to enter into business relations with CKSource.

Source: https://github.com/ckeditor/ckeditor5/issues/991

CKEditor (a rich-text editor) is this kind of really complex piece of software which requires years of experience and years of development. It's also a piece of software which is complex enough to scare people from contributing to it. So people use it for free and report bugs to you. That's all. With that conversion rate about 0.5% and a rather niche market, it's possible to slowly grow your business (as we did – CKSource is 40+ people today), but hard to keep up with the world.

Just to give a context – CKEditor 5 (which was written completely from scratch) required 5+ experienced developers working for more than 4 years right now. Therefore, for CKEditor 5 we chose GPL2+. We hope to have a more healthy paying/free users ratio. The future will show us if that's a good direction

BTW, you say that:

> commercial licenses can be a serious pain to navigate in many companies

From my experience, it's actually the opposite. Companies like our commercial license because it's easier for them than going with e.g. LGPL or MPL and hoping they won't violate it.

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

#69

Post by myfonj »

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…

Seeing you around, I wonder: is Handsontable's soon-to-be-released Spreadsheet Viewer [0] using SheetJS (Pro [1]) / js-xlsx or is related in any way?

[0] https://handsontable.com/spreadsheet-viewer/ [1] http://sheetjs.com/pro

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

#70

Post by harel »

myWindoonn wrote: post #58
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.

Get a day job and use your spare time to produce Free Software. It works for musicians and artists, and it works for our creative endeavor as well. (Code is art and little of what we do is genuine engineering.) As somebody who produces Free Software and has a day job, I think that this new movement will strangle itself, and that that's an appropriate fate.

Actually it's a bit sad musicians must have a day job. I quit any aspirations to make a living of music years ago and didn't look back, purely for the money (can't send my kids to the mines anymore). I know people who were well known internationally recognised musicians who quit music for the same reason. So that example is not the best you can find. Not to me anyway.
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