9 ms·

Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license

112 points by jontro 8y ago

jchw 8y 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?
- TAForObvReasons 8y 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 https://opencollective.com/webpack#contributors which is really impressive!
  - jchw 8y 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 8y ago
  There's an (incomplete) comparison here https://github.com/AmitMY/grids https://github.com/AmitMY/grids and an "awesome" list here: https://github.com/FancyGrid/awesome-grid 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 8y 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).
- TAForObvReasons 8y 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/ https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/
mrtweetyhack 8y ago
Didn't even know about this but there are plenty of alternatives out there.
lazerwalker 8y 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 8y ago
  We ( https://sheetjs.com/ https://sheetjs.com/ ) started from a series of open source projects (our largest https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx 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/ 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 8y 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.
    - Traster 8y ago
      This is a good point. To add some colour to this. In my experience it's not that there's no money to spend. There's tonnes of money to spend, but there's also tonnes of people to spend it. The result is within the company you develop experts, people who know how to get access to the budget. Every year those experts spend a non-trivial amount of time making sure they get the company's budget. They spend tonnes of money, whilst the average employee never sees any cash in their entire tenure. So in some ways it makes sense to make your enterprise price incredibly high - because the people within large companies will either be able to spend loads of money, or non at all. Very few will be anywhere in between (and will find it very difficult to pay or continue to pay over time).
eitland 8y 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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Sphax 8y ago
  Caddy is still open source.
- mholt 8y ago
  I'm surprised that open source gives you peace of mind when your business relies on it.
lixtra 8y 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 https://handsontable.com/pricing
- q3k 8y 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.
nickstefan12 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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;
  - nickstefan12 8y 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.
- chrishere 8y ago
  I remember that particular loop. It’s already gone.
jasonkester 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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?
    - icebraining 8y ago
      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.
siscia 8y 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 8y 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.
  - siscia 8y 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!
svnpenn 8y ago
I would like to use a license like this with my software is a general one available?
- icebraining 8y ago
  There's https://commonsclause.com/ https://commonsclause.com/ which has been much discussed on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22commons%20clause%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22commons%20clause%22&sort=by...
dmitryminkovsky 8y 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 https://github.com/quilljs/quill/graphs/contributors [1] https://github.com/basecamp/trix/graphs/contributors https://github.com/basecamp/trix/graphs/contributors
- kelnage 8y 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?
  - dmitryminkovsky 8y 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.
mcguire 8y 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.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
myliang 8y ago
https://github.com/myliang/x-spreadsheet https://github.com/myliang/x-spreadsheet was MIT License
- myliang 8y ago
  a new choice

112 points by jontro 8y ago

jchw 8y 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?

TAForObvReasons 8y 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 https://opencollective.com/webpack#contributors which is really impressive!
- jchw 8y 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 8y ago
There's an (incomplete) comparison here https://github.com/AmitMY/grids https://github.com/AmitMY/grids and an "awesome" list here: https://github.com/FancyGrid/awesome-grid 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 8y 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).

TAForObvReasons 8y 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/ https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/

mrtweetyhack 8y ago

Didn't even know about this but there are plenty of alternatives out there.

lazerwalker 8y 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 8y ago
We ( https://sheetjs.com/ https://sheetjs.com/ ) started from a series of open source projects (our largest https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx 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/ 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 8y 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.
  - Traster 8y ago
    This is a good point. To add some colour to this. In my experience it's not that there's no money to spend. There's tonnes of money to spend, but there's also tonnes of people to spend it. The result is within the company you develop experts, people who know how to get access to the budget. Every year those experts spend a non-trivial amount of time making sure they get the company's budget. They spend tonnes of money, whilst the average employee never sees any cash in their entire tenure. So in some ways it makes sense to make your enterprise price incredibly high - because the people within large companies will either be able to spend loads of money, or non at all. Very few will be anywhere in between (and will find it very difficult to pay or continue to pay over time).

eitland 8y 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.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Sphax 8y ago
Caddy is still open source.
mholt 8y ago
I'm surprised that open source gives you peace of mind when your business relies on it.

lixtra 8y 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 https://handsontable.com/pricing

q3k 8y 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.

nickstefan12 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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;
- nickstefan12 8y 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.
chrishere 8y ago
I remember that particular loop. It’s already gone.

jasonkester 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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?
  - icebraining 8y ago
    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.

siscia 8y 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 8y 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.
- siscia 8y 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!

svnpenn 8y ago

I would like to use a license like this with my software is a general one available?

icebraining 8y ago
There's https://commonsclause.com/ https://commonsclause.com/ which has been much discussed on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22commons%20clause%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22commons%20clause%22&sort=by...

dmitryminkovsky 8y 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 https://github.com/quilljs/quill/graphs/contributors [1] https://github.com/basecamp/trix/graphs/contributors https://github.com/basecamp/trix/graphs/contributors

kelnage 8y 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?
- dmitryminkovsky 8y 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.

mcguire 8y 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.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

myliang 8y ago

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

myliang 8y ago
a new choice