TW Elements free is MIT now #2326
Pinned
filipkappa
announced in
Announcements
Replies: 0 comments
Sign up for free
to join this conversation on GitHub.
Already have an account?
Sign in to comment
-
With the latest release of TWE, we decided to switch the licensing model of the free package to MIT.
Why we used AGPL in the first place
The first release of TWE was a single package - licensed under AGPL.
AGPL was a more restrictive license, it required TWE users to release their all of their modifications as open source.
Nevertheless, we decided to use AGPL for the first iterations of TWE. We hoped that this will drive innovation & faster growth of the package. We counted on users publishing their templates, projects and component modifications.
There was a pricing plan for the non-AGPL license version, but the package content was all the same. In the PRO version only the licensing rules changed for users, who had specific requirements for their projects and simply couldn't open source them.
The hope was, that we will be able to provide a full package for free, for everyone who could share their projects & innovations with the community, and that we would support the project financially, thanks to those commercial licenses.
Why we decided to drop AGPL in favor of MIT
Unfortunately, no one reads licenses
When it comes to driving innovation with AGPL - we simply found out that users don't open source their projects. We tried to highlight the licensing restrictions in the past couple of weeks, but it didn't work.
We understand that this kind of license is uncommon for a UI Kit. We were testing a novel licensing model, and it shouldn't be a surprise that people don't read the full licensing conditions, when the package is released for free.
We expected this to some extent - there is no fault with the community - this model was experimental from the beginning, and we wanted to see if it's intuitive enough to help the package grow. It wasn't and we note that.
We could try to reach out to developers who used TWE without fulfilling the licensing conditions, but it would require lots of work and also seems pushy, so it's not something we feel comfortable with.
The lesson for us was, that the license of the free version should be simple & we shouldn't require additional action from users.
We were losing money fast
The second reason was strictly economic.
It's not the point that it does not generate profit. The point is it generated losses, and for the sake of the community & open source we accepted it for a few years but we simply cannot afford it anymore.
There is a whole team of wonderful & talented developers behind TWE. As of now, their salaries are paid by other projects we run - mainly MDBootstrap.
We would love to keep developing TWE, and we clearly see that thousands of projects already use it, but as the userbase grows, we have even more needs for support & development. We cannot subsidize TWE forever, so we had to move to a more sustainable model.
What exactly changed?
As mentioned above - TWE used to be a single package with two licenses:
After the change we have two different packages:
The new community license (MIT) for the free part of the project is even less restrictive than AGPL was - feel free to use it without re-publishing the source code now.
What if I already used some components, that are now pro?
We are leaving everything from the previous versions of TWE untouched. Everything that was already published under AGPL will stay under AGPL, that includes:
Everything we released so far will stay open source, and is still fully functional & reliable tool under AGPL.
You can access all versions with their documentation on the same repository under a specific release tag.
You can still download the package & run the documentation locally.
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
All reactions