Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license

https://github.com/handsontable/handsontable/issues/5831

by jontro • 7 years ago

112 73 7 years ago

jchw2• 7 years ago

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?

TAForObvReasons5• 7 years ago

From a business perspective, ag-Grid seems like the most successful / popular solution. They've donated $47500 to webpack https://opencollective.com/webpack#contributors which is really impressive!

jchw2• 7 years ago

Yeah, a place I worked for decided to license agGrid because it was simply the best solution we could find. The React integration was still a bit rough but it did deliver pretty well on the promised features and performance was pretty good too. I imagine a lot of the solutions today are pretty good, but it's been a long time since I've been looking at any of this stuff.

warpspin• 7 years ago

There's an (incomplete) comparison here https://github.com/AmitMY/grids and an "awesome" list here: https://github.com/FancyGrid/awesome-grid

After having worked with DataTables, ag-Grid and having evaluated a couple of others I'd say that ag-Grid Enterprise is the best general purpose grid library at the moment.

Only for the use case where you really need exactly some kind of Excel look-alike/Excel web viewer, Handsontable Pro or SpreadJS will probably be better for you, as ag-Grid does not really offer a finished solution here and also misses a couple of minor features at the moment.

asimjalis• 7 years ago

"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."

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).

TAForObvReasons5• 7 years ago

(3) free users stick with the latest MIT-licensed version

(4) free users fork the free version, like what AWS did with Elasticsearch https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/

lazerwalker• 7 years ago

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?

sheetjs• 7 years ago

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 available in the open source offering. Unless you have something compelling, people won't "convert" out of altruistic desires. Unfortunately that's not how business works. We found many companies deciding to fork our open source libraries before even considering contacting us (for example, the John Deere homepage https://www.deere.com/en/ uses a forked version of our open source offering)

To "increase the conversion rate" you have to either improve the value of the commercial offering or cripple / remove the open source offering. They seem to be doing the latter.

threeseed• 7 years ago

Most people simply don't understand how enterprise companies work.

You think you have plenty of money to spend and it's easy to get licenses for software. Nope. It's often harder than being in a small business. Licenses often mean lengthy RFPs with extensive Legal and Procurement involvement.

Need to try and sneak things under the radar if you want to get them to buy your products.

jeena• 7 years ago

Dual licensing with AGPLv3 and a commercial license might also work.

chrishere2• 7 years ago

Maybe they tried to contact but you didn’t reply? This happened to us, twice.

usrusr• 7 years ago

To "increase the conversion rate" you have to either improve the value of the commercial offering or cripple / remove the open source offering.

I'm not even sure if that would have much influence: the line between paying and non-paying might be just the divide between companies where it's hard to get paid licencing approved and companies where it's hard to get unpaid licensing approved. The key to a high commercial open source conversion rate might be targeting industries where lingering distrust of open source is still common.

testrun• 7 years ago

One thing that might help is to have pricing front and centre.

WorldMaker• 7 years ago

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".

myfonj• 7 years ago

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

eps• 7 years ago

Not the same area, but the norm for installable user-oriented desktop software with a trial option is between 1-2%. If you get to 5%, it's good. 10-15% is phenomenal.

vortico• 7 years ago

VCV (https://vcvrack.com/) converts 2.6% of its free users to customers of its commercial plugins.

Reinmar2• 7 years ago

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

eitland3• 7 years ago

Understandable but a bit disappointing, just like Caddy.

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.

With Handsontable we recommended it at a project and made sure to get commercial licenses - because it was open source.

That said, when I recommend open source at work it is not because of the price but because of peace of mind it gives.

Sphax• 7 years ago

Caddy is still open source.

mholt• 7 years ago

I'm surprised that open source gives you peace of mind when your business relies on it.

lixtra• 7 years ago

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?

This would have involved legal department and dramatically increased cost and time to resolve.

A “not more than 100 unique users per day” license for 1000 USD I would have bought in a blink of an eye.

[1] https://handsontable.com/pricing

q3k• 7 years ago

Agreed, seat-based licenses suck. Like, do you pay for developers that do code review but not necessarily touch this particular codebase? What happens when your company grows, or you get acquired?

Same for 'machine' (or even worse, 'cpu') based ones...

I don't know what a good number for cost scaling would be, if any. But what most companies offer right now is plainly terrible.

nickstefan122• 7 years ago

I will never forget what I found when hacking the internals of Handsontable many years ago...

JavaScript For loops with

- :label (eg go to)

- continue

- break

It was definitely an interesting sperlunk!

arcturus17• 7 years ago

What’s so bad about continue and break? I’ve seen it in different languages in what I consider great projects...

Sometimes you really need an exit in the middle of the loop.

Drakim• 7 years ago

Worst part is, I've seen devs wrap their entire for-loop in an anonymous function JUST so they could use a return; to break out of the loop, instead of using break;

nickstefan122• 7 years ago

Nothing is particularly “bad”. I’ve used them in python a number of times.

I’m more just commenting that it’s a strange / interesting code based worth sight seeing. It was written in a style that seemed like from another language.

chrishere2• 7 years ago

I remember that particular loop. It’s already gone.

jasonkester• 7 years ago

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 that the exploitation is a good thing.

It's like a cult. Except that nearly every software developer in the world is in on it.

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.

The things you build have value. They're making other people billions of dollars. Charge accordingly.

grumpydba• 7 years ago

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.

ioulian• 7 years ago

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?

TAForObvReasons5• 7 years ago

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.

mrighele• 7 years ago

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.

nitemice• 7 years ago

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).

amelius• 7 years ago

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

0815test• 7 years ago

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.

eitland3• 7 years ago

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.

TAForObvReasons5• 7 years ago

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

onlydeadheroes• 7 years ago

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.

anoncake• 7 years ago

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.

jononor• 7 years ago

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.

myWindoonn2• 7 years ago

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?

hobs• 7 years ago

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.

astazangasta• 7 years ago

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.

cr0sh• 7 years ago

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?

siscia2• 7 years ago

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.

nullandvoid• 7 years ago

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, rails, django, etc. etc. etc. - we've all decided to charge $2000/year - what would handsontable inc.'s toolchain or website cost? Would you have even learn to code? The software industry would look like the airline industry, the world would be a less fun place. "

I think they pose a good point - How is any hobbyist meant to get setup with a solid JS stack which involves 10's / hundreds of dependencies if you have to pay 10k/y+ licence fees before you have any paying customers? It actually feels like the opposite of progress as now only the big bugs can afford to set up shop with the best tech for their product.

Ultimately I think there's space for commercially available open source projects - the issue is the lack of companies / individuals giving back to sustain this movement.

siscia2• 7 years ago

I understand this point very well, but I believe we are way too far on the wrong side.

First of all I don't think is fair from software developer. We do real engineering and still we are not recognize as engineer. A transaction to a more rigours profession is good in my opinion and if that includes costs like receiving a degree or upfront buying expensive equipment, I am not so against it.

A product that is sold ensure maintenance and ongoing development which is very very needed with too many tools and libraries developed by amateurs that polutes the whole ecosystem.

Try to reverse your example, immagine the airline industry as it was the software one. Would it be more fun? Surely, we would have jetpacks, small private elicopters and everything will "move fast", but they will crush any other flights... Would it be better for the society? I doubt it.

Of course there is a reasonable middle ground!

ThrowawayR2• 7 years ago

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.

myWindoonn2• 7 years ago

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.

harel• 7 years ago

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.

svnpenn• 7 years ago

I would like to use a license like this with my software

is a general one available?

icebraining2• 7 years ago

There's https://commonsclause.com/ which has been much discussed on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22commons%20clause%22&sort=by...

dmitryminkovsky3• 7 years ago

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 developers who account for 95% of code changes[0][1]. If they went away, the project would die. Commercially, that’s a huge risk.

EDIT: Just read this license. I wonder why they went with license keys?

[0] https://github.com/quilljs/quill/graphs/contributors

[1] https://github.com/basecamp/trix/graphs/contributors

kelnage3• 7 years ago

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?

dmitryminkovsky3• 7 years ago

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 both worlds for project that require a lot of domain knowledge from developers (eg. the highest-end knowledge of browser compatibility issues, which is required to build a contenteditable rich text editor). You may not agree, but my perspective is that in the open source world, the reality is that the primary developer is the difference between the project existing and not existing. You can just ignore that and not compensate that person with anything but good vibes, but then you'll find that the project no longer exists.

mcguire2• 7 years ago

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

mcguire2• 7 years ago

"Handsontable is a JavaScript/HTML5 data grid component with spreadsheet look & feel. It provides easy data binding, data validation, filtering, sorting and CRUD operations."

They may have shot their user stream in the feet.

myliang2• 7 years ago

https://github.com/myliang/x-spreadsheet was MIT License

myliang2• 7 years ago

a new choice

Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license

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