Comment by cameronh90 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cameronh90 | Hacker News Reader

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Any company that is giving away open source software for free seems to eventually go down the route of open core or restricting commercial use of their open source product.

Uno seem to be starting to go down the enterprise support route - plus open core with their recent Figma plugin release. At least the Figma plugin is very tangential to the core product so it's hard to imagine it competing for features at this stage.

Though with the recent spate of open source company rug-pulls, and I'd struggle to justify using it. It seems like open source is increasingly just being used to build market share, then the VC/PEs come in, make a "contact us" enterprise pricing page, and suddenly issues and PRs start getting rejected because they compete with the paid add-ons.

I really hope the same won't happen with Uno, because it looks like a great library, and something that's missing from the dotnet world. Their sustainability blog post gives me hope, but... sadly it would not be the first time that founders with good intentions find out that running an open source company is nearly impossible, end up taking funding to keep up, then the rest is history.

Uno founder here.

Uno as a UI framework is and will remain FOSS. It's been our strategy from day one and core to how we operate.

We see real opportunities to build productivity-focused products on top of it that will bring licensing revenues. Our Figma Design-Code plugin is a proof point and we have a lot more to come.

Thank you for caring and for the insights.

Looks awesome. How easy is it to use other libraries together with Uno? Say OpenGL for iOS and Android. Any examples? Looks very interesting.

You can embed any native component per platform.

We're actively working on bringing an unified OpenGL control in our Toolkit so it works on all platforms and be ready-to-use. Stay tuned!

I appreciate your statement here, but I think part of the reason the GP commented on this is that we hear this from companies all the time. We all recognize that you're speaking the truth of today, but things change. This may be important to you, but unless Uno is your lifestyle business and you maintain control despite external pressures from board members brought on as capital sources, you're not capable of providing a guarantee in perpetuity, let alone for any well defined metric of time.

It's fair for us to be gunshy. There's simply too many examples of OSS projects highly used across the web that made these kind of promises earlier on in the product's lifecycle, many if not most of them with the best of intentions at the time the promise was made. I trust that what you're saying is true today. Until we start to see more OSS projects with sustainability models that are both successful at staving off negative influence from funding partners, and those sustainability models leading to companies making good on the declarations of altruism they made when they were younger, I think we're going to remain unsure and unconfident in promises like this.

Don't think it's going to stop us from checking out your product or potentially building really cool stuff with it. But until you prove to us that you'll keep this ethos, we will start using this really cool framework with one hand while we keep another hand free to stabilize ourselves in what feels like an inevitable rugpull that isn't a matter of if, but when.

I wonder if your point of view, which I describe as "open source absolutist/optimist", has any facts to prove that your point of view is actually a thing that exists, or is fantasy...no offense. Maybe even the biggest open source projects are currently on "borrowed time"?

I'm sorry I wrote this as I didn't actually review the project and see if the source code is available. It appears to be closed source. Your concerns are definitely valid.

My comment was more directed to open source, and I would say to you that the only in-perpetuity guarantee is to fork it.

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