Great to hear.<p>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 that the exploitation is a good thing.<p>It's like a cult. Except that nearly every software developer in the world is in on it.<p>I'm certainly not helping the situation personally, and will happily use whatever Open Source software product helps my business for free. But I do hope that people come to their senses at some point and stop peer-pressuring each other into continuing to spend so much effort polishing good software only to give it away for free.<p>The things you build have value. They're making other people billions of dollars. Charge accordingly.
> The MIT license is replaced with a custom, ‘free for non-commercial and evaluation’ license<p>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 developers who account for 95% of code changes[0][1]. If they went away, the project would die. Commercially, that’s a huge risk.<p>EDIT: Just read this license. I wonder why they went with license keys?<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/quilljs/quill/graphs/contributors" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/quilljs/quill/graphs/contributors</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/basecamp/trix/graphs/contributors" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/basecamp/trix/graphs/contributors</a>
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?<p>This would have involved legal department and dramatically increased cost and time to resolve.<p>A “not more than 100 unique users per day” license for 1000 USD I would have bought in a blink of an eye.<p>[1] <a href="https://handsontable.com/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://handsontable.com/pricing</a>
"Essentially, [Handsontable] was kept running thanks to the money earned from Handsontable Pro. Unfortunately, our observation is that the ratio of commercial to free users is about 1 to 25. Hence, the only way for us to keep investing in the product is to convert more free users into paying."<p>This license change can play out in three ways: (1) free users convert to paying users, (2) free users move to other products with more liberal licenses, (3) combination of (1) and (2).
> Unfortunately, our observation is that the ratio of commercial to free users is about 1 to 25.<p>That's a ~4% conversion rate. Anyone have data for any similar OSS software libraries with a free tier?
Understandable but a bit disappointing, just like Caddy.<p>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.<p>With Handsontable we recommended it at a project and made sure to get commercial licenses - <i>because it was open source</i>.<p>That said, when I recommend open source at work it is not because of the price but because of peace of mind it gives.
As somebody trying to make a living out of open source software, I am really glad of this new movement.<p>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.
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?
<a href="https://github.com/myliang/x-spreadsheet" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/myliang/x-spreadsheet</a> was MIT License
"<i>Handsontable is a JavaScript/HTML5 data grid component with spreadsheet look & feel.
It provides easy data binding, data validation, filtering, sorting and CRUD operations.</i>"<p>They may have shot their user stream in the feet.
I will never forget what I found when hacking the internals of Handsontable many years ago...<p>JavaScript For loops with<p>- :label (eg go to)<p>- continue<p>- break<p>It was definitely an interesting sperlunk!