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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 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.

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

Can't remember who it was but one of their competitors where clearly not understanding open source, they'd state it was Apache licensed and freely available *but according to them you had to sign an agreement and pay a fee to use it commercially".

About ag-Grid and Handsontable... I am founder of another JavaScript Grid product. FancyGrid - https://fancygrid.com I know much about this market and situation. ag-Grid is too popular and trampled all competitors over catching almost all possible commercial clients. It is unreal to compete with them, they killed this market and become monopolist. Handsontable has no way to do. Now ag-Grid also is going to kill JavaScript Chart Libraries market. Sorely ag-Grid is too successful and leaves no chance for competitors to survive.

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 AWS forking the project: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-...

The same exact issue applies here:

> The maintainers of open source projects have the responsibility of keeping the source distribution open to everyone and not changing the rules midstream

> we believe that maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure that the primary open source distribution remains open and free of proprietary code

Those comments aren't an indictment of the open core business model or of attempts to monetize open source, but rather a criticism of "muddying the waters" and trying to create licensing confusion.

> The maintainers of open source projects have the responsibility of keeping the source distribution open to everyone and not changing the rules midstream

> we believe that maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure that the primary open source distribution remains open and free of proprietary code

I disagree. Nobody has the responsibility to do anything for free. Amazon is free to take that responsibility for itself though.

The fact that this comes from a company that in more than one case has modified an open source project and kept the changes hidden behind a SaaS only adds insult to injury.

> Nobody has the responsibility to do anything for free.

In general, yes. If you call something an Open Source project, however you take on certain responsabilities that you wouldn't otherwise have, such as not playing bait-and-switch, and can hope for people sending in bug fixes and patches (and even signing copyright assignments if required for dual licensing).

If it were just "doing things for free" and not receiving anything in return, FOSS would not interest anyone and we'd get back to the shareware world of the 90s where (as a user) you got an evaluation license but no stake. Some developers prefer the shareware model to going full OSS, which is fine. Playing bait-and-switch by turning an Open Source project (with the community and the help and credibility that potentially come out of it) into a Shareware product will, like any bait-and-switch, irritate people.

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 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).

> 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.

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)

You have misinterpreted that particular bit of economic wisdom.

"Anything that people will do, they can be paid to do." This means that, if people are already doing something, then it is possible to form a market by compensating them and claiming that the compensation is due to what they have done. However, it does not mean that things which you intend to do will be compensated.

It's painful to listen to the same tired anti-Free Software arguments. You feel that money is a reasonable yardstick for value, but if it were, then most commercial software would be given away, since software is merely information (a collection of bits) and information markets always have a degenerate behavior where the value of any particular piece of information tends towards zero as the number of people who know it climbs. (Formally, these markets have the quirk that every purchaser becomes a seller, causing the market to spiral into a degenerate shape.) Indeed, SaaS embodies this economic lesson.

Worse, you've confused giving away Free Software with giving away hours of labor to startups. These are very different situations, and I think that you know it, but by confusing them, you get to claim that FSF and GNOME are as exploitative as Y Combinator. To give you a clue, one side backs Free Software, and the other side doesn't.

Hearing a cultist of finance decry the cult of Free Software is pretty cute. Of course you're gonna be uncomfortable with our model and the fact that it gets shit done. Either loosen your mind or continue to be uncomfortable.

The things you've said have negative value. Indeed, you are not helping the situation personally. As a result, I'd like to invoice you.

Ending thought: Isn't almost all software actually shit? Why do you think that it has value?

In general I think you are right, but imo you have one serious flaw in your argument

>Worse, you've confused giving away Free Software with giving away hours of labor to startups. These are very different situations, and I think that you know it, but by confusing them, you get to claim that FSF and GNOME are as exploitative as Y Combinator. To give you a clue, one side backs Free Software, and the other side doesn't.

If you are working yourself to death for free software instead of ycom, you die the same. Producing free software isnt some magical net good that is worth your life.

Open source does NOT equate to "giving away one's work for free", nor is there any "duty" to do anything like that. We really should put this misconception to rest. You can and should crowdfund open source work, or you can even just make it clear that you won't be expending any effort on maintaining the software and keeping it in a usable state unless someone sponsors your work with hard cash.

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.

> 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 must pay the original creators?

You can't fork the current version and use it for commercial purposes, regardless of what you change, but you can fork the previous version and keep using it under the old license.

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.

> 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.

It is also much easier to use open source work as demonstration of competence to land consulting gigs or a job, compared to proprietary work.

> 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?

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.

The situation will only grow as more and more people become programming-literate in Asia.