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Skip is now free and open source

skip.dev

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Re: Skip is now free and open source

#221

Post by adrianN »

likium wrote: post #211
adrianN wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a hobbyist programmer I make precisely zero dollars a year so paying for my tools only makes sense if they increase my nonmonetary enjoyment. As an employee I have very little power to convince my company to buy a certain tool and I tend to prefer the tools I‘m already familiar with from my hobby.

Equipment for any real life hobby costs money, and people are willing to pay for good equipment. Why is software so different? FOSS has made us so resistant to paying for good software. I'm not saying software has to be expensive, even $20 per major version could make a burgeoning indie industry thrive.

The equipment I pay for is my laptop

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#222

Post by kstrauser »

ninalanyon wrote: post #210
nsm wrote: post #70

> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge. This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession. Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!

Employees don't pay for tools and usually have no say in which tools are bought. Car mechanics don't pay for spanners, their employers do.

The mechanics I’ve know all had to buy their own tools. That may be different if you’re at a specialist shop, like a place that only fixes specific parts expensive makes of cars. The guy at the local auto shop fixing whatever drives in that day almost certainly had to buy all of his.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#223

Post by OkayPhysicist »

NamlchakKhandro wrote: post #103
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS, because unlike any other field, we are employed in the field that makes the tools our field uses, and distribution and manufacturing costs are zero. People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to. If the rest of the economy worked like this we would be in full-blown utopia. Selling software to softwa…

> distribution and manufacturing costs are zero. ???? citation needed

To clarify, I used "manufacturing" there, as opposed to R&D, to differentiate from physical stuff. Software costs lots to develop, but nothing to make a second copy of.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#224

Post by OkayPhysicist »

eucyclos wrote: post #144
d0liver wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Manufacturing costs are zero No. The fact that you built something yourself doesn't make it free to produce. More over, you __won't__. You simply cannot build all of the things that you could buy at scale. What if you had to write all of your own video games? Or operating systems?

I think they mean cost of incremental units. 0->1 is much more expensive than 1->100 in software, unlike with things like lattes or houses

Yeah, "manufacturing" is a different step than "R&D"

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#225

Post by eseidel »

satvikpendem wrote: post #218
x0x0 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And are comfortable making a 1-2 million dollar per devteam per year bet that Google won't rug pull you. And they seem to have no important or big app on it. On an unrelated note, in 2024 Google did layoffs on the Flutter team.

https://shorebird.dev/blog/flutter-not-dead/ Also, the layoffs were for infrastructure engineers who were working on Flutter builds not actual core Flutter devs. And the layoff was just an offshoring, they moved the same jobs from the US to Europe.

Former Flutter Director, Shorebird founder here. Yes, that matches my understanding. The layoffs happened after I left Google, but yes Google appears to have simply off-shored the infrastructure (build and release) team.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#226

Post by wahnfrieden »

speedgoose wrote: post #179
gpm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand the LGPL - not a lawyer - you have to somehow enable all your users to relink your application against a different version of Skip (4.d.0 since 4.d.1 isn't possible on iOS). This means that your application must do something like include a copy of all the files that went into linking the application and convey that to the users along with your application, with scripts to build the application against…

Alright, that’s a fair point.

It's fully irrelevant because the LGPL code is for the build tool only.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#227

Post by marcprux »

gman83 wrote: post #199
marcprux wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my response below on the KMP question: the comparison with CMP mostly applies to Flutter as well. > near-native mobile apps (the difference is almost negligible) Not as of the advent of Liquid Glass on iOS (and, to a lesser extent, Material Expressive on Android). Flutter isn't going to be implementing these new interface conventions[1], and so the UI for these apps are stuck on the last generation and are alread…

Flutter is undergoing a major refactor where they're decoupling Material and Cupertino into separate packages. This is the reason why they're not implementing those new conventions right away. The way you've framed it is pretty disingenuous.

It really isn't. Did you see their latest time estimate (https://youtu.be/W4olXg91iX8?t=538)? Late 2026 just to get the widget sets broken out into separate packages? And only then can they start considering modernizing them and trying to mimic the latest UI?

Flutter can't even get animations to look and feel right for iOS 18 and below (read through this thread and every other HN/Reddit thread that mentions Flutter vs. native components). Do you really think they'll ever get Liquid Glass looking and feeling convincing, let alone performing acceptably?

Read over the 100+ comments in the GH issue I posted. You see actual Flutter contributors — not people who merely vibe-coded a Potemkin L.G. demo and declared victory — saying that it is effectively impossible.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#228

Post by zerr »

marcprux wrote: post #12
ppeetteerr wrote: post #7

This is amazing! Thank you for open sourcing the project. It must have been a hard decision.

Thanks! It has been a long time coming. As we mentioned in the post, developer tools really need to be freely obtainable in order to gain mass adoption. In that sense, it was an easy strategic decision. And we felt that the time was right, given that Skip's benefits are being thrust to the foreground in light of recent developments.

When it comes to the mass adoption of software development tools, I believe the proven formula is: Make all of the SDK/libraries/command-line tools permissive (e.g. MIT) open source licensed; Charge for a complex visual/RAD UI designer/IDE but make sure to have a free community version for indies and smaller shops. In the past, instead of a free community version there were easily available "pirated" releases.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#229

Post by WA »

daveidol wrote: post #62
eptcyka wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Flutter still doesn't support liquid glass on iOS Literally every iOS developer under the sun will tell me that this is a good thing.

Why? I'm an iOS developer and, while I don't love everything about liquid glass, that is the current design language of iOS. I certainly don't think having my app sticking out like a sore thumb, using a design language from old outdated iOS versions is "a good thing"

The new direction isn’t Liquid Glass, but a more unified branding across Android and iOS. WhatsApp, Google Maps, Instagram, Netflix, Prime Video, and many others don’t look dated, because they don’t make heavy use of the older iOS design language at all.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#230

Post by x0x0 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #218
x0x0 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And are comfortable making a 1-2 million dollar per devteam per year bet that Google won't rug pull you. And they seem to have no important or big app on it. On an unrelated note, in 2024 Google did layoffs on the Flutter team.

https://shorebird.dev/blog/flutter-not-dead/ Also, the layoffs were for infrastructure engineers who were working on Flutter builds not actual core Flutter devs. And the layoff was just an offshoring, they moved the same jobs from the US to Europe.

That article answers a question nobody had while lying to conflate the poor answer with what people actually want to know.

The question isn't if Flutter is dead. It's (1) will Google continue to invest resources to maintain it (and note they could easily make their commitment firm, and have chosen not to do so for obvious reasons: they value the optionality to stop support); and (2) if Google were to reduce/end support, is there enough community, and by community we really mean companies with investments they can't walk away from, to take over maintenance and ongoing development to maintain it as an sdk that can target the evolving platforms.

So whether Whirlpool or Toyota use Flutter is entirely irrelevant. You can maintain in-car systems on private code, evidenced by how that was historically done. Toyota using this as their sdk for in-car whatever doesn't help someone whose problem is they need Flutter to work well on ios/android.

Whirlpool building an ecommerce app for Brazil... golf clap. Same as MGM's app. Small teams built those; small teams can build new ones. who cares.

Even citing the whirlpool app, which is (link followed) actually this:

https://flutter.dev/showcase/whirlpool

built by a small outsourced company makes clear how thin the support actually is. Suppose google drops support: how many ft engineers is Whirlpool going to pay to maintain Flutter as a first-class deploy target? I'd bet zero.

There's nobody like, just for example, Shopify with a multi-billion dollar commitment and a history of open source work who has an investment they're stuck with. or Facebook. Google's internal ads doesn't count: they already Angular'd people. They're perfectly capable of maintaining that as a one-off internal sdk.

They don't use it for gmail/maps. Or anything where the migration costs start with a B.

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