<story><title>Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license</title><url>https://github.com/handsontable/handsontable/issues/5831</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jasonkester</author><text>Great to hear.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s painful to watch so many good developers giving away their best work for free, because they feel it&amp;#x27;s somehow their duty to do so.  It&amp;#x27;s the same feeling I get watching fresh graduates working 100 hour weeks for these startups because there&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s like a cult.  Except that nearly every software developer in the world is in on it.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;The things you build have value.  They&amp;#x27;re making other people billions of dollars.  Charge accordingly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eitland</author><text>Well:&lt;p&gt;- 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.&lt;p&gt;- 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.&lt;p&gt;- They might have gotten of the hook a bit easier a couple of times (bugs, half a year of delays) than if they&amp;#x27;d been commercial.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know, I thought many people here would do the same but I don&amp;#x27;t know so I cannot say how much goodwill they are losing.</text></comment>
<story><title>Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license</title><url>https://github.com/handsontable/handsontable/issues/5831</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jasonkester</author><text>Great to hear.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s painful to watch so many good developers giving away their best work for free, because they feel it&amp;#x27;s somehow their duty to do so.  It&amp;#x27;s the same feeling I get watching fresh graduates working 100 hour weeks for these startups because there&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s like a cult.  Except that nearly every software developer in the world is in on it.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;The things you build have value.  They&amp;#x27;re making other people billions of dollars.  Charge accordingly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TAForObvReasons</author><text>This announcement is about Handsontable completely shutting down the open source offering and &lt;i&gt;using the same distribution channels to pump proprietary software&lt;/i&gt;.  Wheres a month ago  &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;handsontable&amp;#x2F;handsontable&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;handsontable&amp;#x2F;handsontable&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt; had open source code, now it is all proprietary.  That&amp;#x27;s not something to celebrate.&lt;p&gt;As pointed out in the github discussion, Elastic did the same thing with Elasticsearch, and that contributed to AWS forking the project: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;aws.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;blogs&amp;#x2F;opensource&amp;#x2F;keeping-open-source-open-open-distro-for-elasticsearch&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;aws.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;blogs&amp;#x2F;opensource&amp;#x2F;keeping-open-source-...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The same exact issue applies here:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The maintainers of open source projects have the responsibility of keeping the source distribution open to everyone and &lt;i&gt;not changing the rules midstream&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; we believe that maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure that &lt;i&gt;the primary open source distribution remains open and free of proprietary code&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Those comments aren&amp;#x27;t an indictment of the open core business model or of attempts to monetize open source, but rather a criticism of &amp;quot;muddying the waters&amp;quot; and trying to create licensing confusion.</text></comment>