QuestPDF development and licensing opportunities #491
Replies: 23 comments 61 replies
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Hello, just wanted to notice you that the link on your website leads to localhost. |
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Great catch! Don't run the dev environment when testing the deployed app - this is a lesson for the next time 😂 Thank you for noticing the issue. |
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I don't think this is a good idea. It means open source software using a standard license can no longer reference this project without changing their license to a non-standard license. A "MIT except ..." license is no longer a MIT license, it is a custom license. How would you deal with outside contributions? Will you maintain separate codebases so those future 3rd party contributions become accessible under MIT or will those only be accesible for those who can adopt the custom license? What if they diverge? Would people/companies still want to contribute to a project under the custom license? |
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Hi 😁 Thank you for sharing your perspective and presenting concerns. This is exactly what this discussion is all about - ironing out every potential problem way before taking any action. I will do my best to answer your questions:
Developers contributing to OSS projects is nothing more than a myth. At this moment, QuestPDF has 19 external contributors, while only a handful implemented more significant changes and/or helped by providing community support. I want to emphasize that I highly appreciate every type of help. That being said, community-developed libraries is just a dream, the vast majority of work is in hands of a couple of highly involved people. Honestly speaking, this is all expected, we all have jobs, side projects, hobbies and families - it is hard to find time to support projects of others. This observation is true in most OSS projects. As an example, you may find similar comments for libraries such as: core-js, Vuetify, ImageSharp, SkiaSharp, etc. Where number of contributors and/or level of sponsorship is minimal compared to the size of project and its popularity. On the other side of the spectrum, you may find OSS developed by companies, where involved developers are just getting paid, most likely highly paid (as we are speaking of Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc.). This is a very different situation than libraries developed by enthusiasts.
Developing two separate repositories is not an option. The idea is to deliver one, fully-featured library for free for the vast majority of users, while trying to fund its development by offering professional support for bigger companies. I don't think that keeping certain features only for paying users is a viable option. Of course, one of the alternatives is to keep the MIT license but only to offer the professional support. However, this is tricky for multiple reasons. My goal is to improve developers experience, offer better tutorials, examples and API documentation. This all minimizes the need for having a support, and basically contradicts the idea. Not to mention that most of the companies don't bother to sponsor projects or pay for help - this is sad but true. In terms of licensing, I am open to discuss any concerns. I did my best to minimize the impact that the licensing change may do. Mostly by greatly reducing the number of users that this modification refers to, and by extending the 2022.12.X support time frame. If anybody actively contributes to OSS projects, please share your thoughts. Would you like to share any real world examples where the project may have difficulties with adopting a new license? This adoption process involves of course updating dependency to the new version. You can always decide to not update, fork the last version that was under the MIT license, or simply decide not to pay and still use it. After all, as a single developer, I don't have any power nor willingness to sue big companies 🤣 I am sure that none of us is proficient in international law, but let's give it a try 😁 |
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In the survey, there are a couple of interesting comments. As this discussion is mostly about discussing negative impact of the licensing change, and about finding better alternatives, I would like to present my thoughts about rised concerns:
I have applied around two years ago (link), without any success. I was hoping for recognition and promotion. It turns out that the .NET Foundation is not interested in small projects. Now, taking into account the state of that group, internal frictions and problems, I am not interested in joining any more. As an example, you may find a big uproar when the ImageSharp library left the foundation - in my personal opinion, the foundation couldn't handle this case worse.
This is a relatively new concept. I am sure that most of the OSS maintainers are currently thinking about this movement. Because the general community consensus about hybrid licenses is not clear, I decided to create the survey. I want to learn more and discuss any concerns before taking any action 😊
I totally get your point. Way before I started QuestPDF development, my opinion was quite similar. Once I am on the other side, not a consumer anymore but a creator, I have started to realize all difficulties related to maintaining OSS. I truly believe that the vast majority of OSS start with a person who wants to share the experience and help the entire community by creating something new. But when those attempts are successful, the same person needs to lead a huge popular project, with certain duties and expectations. This is not software development anymore but also marketing, documentation writing, public relations, creating long-term strategies, offering support. And of course... everything in your spare precious time. After all, we all have jobs, hobbies, families. Should that person decide to increase his OSS priority over hobbies? Or worse, over family? So the questions begin to appear. What should that person do to maintain the project? Maybe sponsorship? Well, that does not work. Very few developers and companies decide to sponsor OSS projects, especially when the project is a niche. And you still need to pay taxes and accountancy costs for every donation. From time to time, we hear frustrated maintainers who are dedicating their lives to thanklessly support important libraries without much help. For us, developers, updating a library to a new version is usually as simple as just changing a single number. But behind that number, somebody needed to spend a dozen of evenings of hard work. Trust me, developing an OSS project with a plan to turn it into a successful business in the future, is the worst business plan ever. If anybody thinks about such a strategy, I highly recommend to abandon that idea! Don't think that sponsorship is comparable to regular developer salary, quite the opposite. OSS is about helping the community, not about making money. I am thankful for everybody who trusts QuestPDF, who decided to use it as a dependency, and especially who helps the project in any way. Being trustworthy is my priority, hence I decided to discuss the entire topic with the Community. I am prepared that the presented idea may come with mixed emotions. That being said, I am sure that everyone cares (or should care) about stability of his dependencies. I want to ensure that everybody, who uses or will use QuestPDF, can be certain about its availability and quality in the future. I hope you understand that this is not about taking advantage over the situation in an unfair way, rather about solicitude of the project and all its users 😊 |
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I would like to provide my response to a couple of more comments from the survey. Here it goes 😁
The survey and this discussion are purely to asses the idea with the Community and to find a proper way to ensure QuestPDF future. There is nothing decided yet. Based on your concerns, I understand that you are working in a corporation that may be required to purchase the paid license. Is it really that bad to not only get a great library but also proper support?
The dual license is one of the possibilities, one that I consider as the most viable. I am open to discuss any alternatives. Please notice that the idea is to offer the paid version only to biggest companies. What is better? Pay for the library, have access to proper support, and rely on solid dependency? Or use a library that may fix the bug you are encountering not immediately, but after a couple of months? Of course, I am exaggerating a little bit, but it shows the point. How is it, that in real life, everyone knows that nothing is free, but suddenly in software managers are highly scared of paying for quality? And therefore maintainers need to think about so radical steps such as license change?
I also fear that there is no hope for open-source projects. Well, in such a case, we all need to accept that the entire industry relies on fragile projects developed by enthusiasts. Projects that may suffer with quality and stability issues, just because their maintainers don't have time to develop them. Maintainers that could be way more tired and frustrated than I am, and may do stupid things.
Over two years ago, when I decided to publish the library under the MIT license - this was my conscious and deliberate decision. I fully accepted that the project is not a business and I need to develop it in my spare time as the commitment to the .NET Community. Now, the situation is different: if I want to push to project forward, I need to increase its importance in my life. Otherwise, it will always be at the very end of the list.
The QuestPDF library is a part of the GitHub Sponsors program for around 8 months. This has started thanks to encouragement and a great help from JetBrains. Huge thanks to all QuestPDF sponsors! 🥰 The primary problem in this approach is the amount of funding. Right now, the GitHub Sponsors program is around 3% of my income, so quite negligible. I tend to think about it as a way of appreciation rather than funding for a next feature. Also, I need to pay taxes and accountancy costs for each donation. All things considered, GitHub Sponsors does not change the situation in any significant way.
QuestPDF right now uses the MIT license, meaning it is free for commercial usage, in any form. The proposed This is quite similar to what has happened to EPPlus. Isn't it the most hated library at this moment just because of that change from open-source to no-commercial license?
I would like to improve the documentation, create more tutorials and generally make the development experience better. Consultation and support should be the last resort option in my opinion. This reduces the need of having a paid support, right? In terms of feature priority - this is tricky. I cannot promise to develop new features when an external company decides to pay for it. Some features may require a significant architecture change or to be implemented from scratch. Something that may take months to make it right. Avalonia is a huge framework, there is plenty of areas that may require consulting services. But mainly because the official documentation suffers from lack of examples. (I understand why the documentation looks this way, QuestPDF documentation has a similar problem, just an observation)
My goal is to ensure QuestPDF stability, quality and availability, to build trust that this is solid dependency. In order to continue library development, I need to increase its importance over other activities; including job, hobbies and family. This is the primary reason of assessing the paid license. I don't feel any need to build a profitable business. This is not in the scope. |
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Hi, just an idea, not sure if anything like this exist. Is it possible that this package is free to use when user have existing license like Jetbrain Rider? and you share a piece of cake from them? Idea comes from packages within Unreal Engine Store, they have many packages mentioned that they're free to use if used in Unreal Engine. Since you already have support from Jetbrains, you can talk to them if something like this already exist. Just my 2 cents. No idea if this will work. I still hope this package can remain MIT license. But I understand your struggle. Update: I just noticed your roadmap has 2 things: previewer and secure and signing, I believe you can lock these 2 into separate commercial license. |
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This is of course a viable option, keeping certain features only for paying customers. That being said, I consider the QuestPDF Previewer as a fantastic tool, a game-changer that greatly enhances the development cycle. Also, the idea has been started by @bennetbo and his help was invaluable. In my opinion, hiding the application behind a pay-wall would be unfair towards the Community. Though, most likely it would be a wise business decisions 🤣 |
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Leading a popular open-source project is a blessing, but also involves additional responsibilities and requires a lot of time. I would like to ensure QuestPDF stability and future development, and allow the project to reach its fullest potential. I am looking for ways to increase its priority in my life, a way that is financially safe and time viable. I am considering a hybrid license, so to minimize the impact: keep open-source nature, offer fully-featured library for free for commercial usage for the vast majority of users, and fund the development by being professional and by offering priority support for largest businesses. I started this discussion to assess available options before performing any changes. You can find the full story here. @bennetbo @girlpunk @rstm-sf @AntonyCorbett Your help is exceptional! Thank you for your engagement in features development and providing an excellent Community support. Would you like to share your perspective about ensuring library stability? @matkoch @maartenba Your decision to showcase the project in the @Laptop765 @markgould @GilchristT @TaylorEdm @pespinho @NaseemHajoj @thomasstevens89 @OrganizationUsername @insulationman @knoxyz @HYDRA2568 @innercitypressure @great-work-told-is You are/were QuestPDF sponsors. I highly appreciate your financial help, you really give me motivation to push forward! What is your opinion about financing open-source development? @SvizelPritula @schulz3000 @knoxyz @loxsmoke @CollinAlpert @emanueleguastella @danielchalmers @simusr2 @fredericoregateiro @warrantyvoids @SvizelPritula @schulz3000 @donmurta @jcl-aadlab @lmingle @avobelk @thomasstevens89 @Dismall @pha3z @qcz @pespinho Thank you for contributing to QuestPDF and offering your help. Even small changes are meaningful when done by many. What is your perspective in this topic? @jnyrup @wieslawsoltes You have much more experience in the open-source world. I would love to know your opinion. Please share your thoughts. @JimBobSquarePants You went through a similar process with the ImageSharp library. Would you like to share your experience and conclusions? How viable is this movement? How many companies decide to purchase the Enterprise license? Do you have any licensing concerns or recommendations? |
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A few points:
We started using it after I saw some Reddit post, played around with it privately, found it very pleasant to work with, and introduced it at work. However, the software I am involved with professionally mostly runs on heavily protected networks, and dealing with licensing of some commercial products (and their bugs, which we could not fix) is absolutely one of the major benefits of QuestPDF. I would consider a few things when starting a duel-licensing model:
For the paid support: Did that pay off already, or is there no reaction? Would it be possible to set-up a corporate sponsor option as well, where companies could either (or both!) provide developer time/testing time and financial means beside the sponsor option? That would lead to big 'users' with enough money hopefully paying for support, smaller companies being able to test/provide dev-time for fixes etc, while still keeping the bar really low to start using this very nice library. So in short: MIT is amazing, as is this library. Paid support sounds like a good idea, but don't forget other means of support. Also, commercial licenses are generally pain and would be a tad of an issue for my usecase! |
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Hello, there! I love this project and admire your work a lot, but I am afraid that I don't have an informed opinion about the hybrid licensing. I do understand the problem that you are having and hope that you can find a solution, which will allow you to put this project at the priority level you want it to have in your life. If I do have any thoughts that I think could help with the discussion, I will be sure to come back and share them with you ant the community. |
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@warrantyvoids Thank you for proving your feedback, with so many useful details! I highly appreciate the effort you have put in the comment.
I am not planning to introduce license keys. To much hassle with generation, offline/online validation, expiration dates, regeneration, assigning to the company name, etc. And... I also do hate them! 😁 I would like to operate on trust. Making sure that developers are well informed about both license tiers and will inform the management about it. And maybe 1-2 companies per month will decide to follow the license and hopefully purchase the paid version.
I would like to keep the simplest license possible, easy rules, no strings attached. I am also planning to extend the
This is exactly the case why I decided to follow the hybrid license model. My goal is to speed up the learning process and enhance development experience as much as I can. I don't want to improve the documentation, feeling fear that the paid support will become useless 🤣 As an example, I would like to discuss the Vuetify library (an open-source UI library for VueJS). I haven't seen a better and more detailed documentation. Working with it became my second nature, just copy an example as a starting point, and then adjust to your requirements. But... that also means, my team does not need any support from Vuetify. And even if I am raising the discussion about supporting our open-source dependencies to ensure the stability of our own products, it is not easy to win with managers and their Excels 😥
Here you can find my idea about licensing tiers. Feel free to share your opinion and comments.
Technically, the option with paid-support is available in GitHub Sponsors and costs 250$. For last 8 months, nobody decided to use it. Granted, I haven't promoted it much. I was also hoping that the QuestPDF GitHub page could be an advertisement area. My idea was as follows: when the company sponsors the project at high enough level (it was 250$ per month if I remember correctly), it will be visible on the GitHub project's homepage with a customized description and link. This could be used as a way of improving public relations, finding developers/employees, showing that the company cares about open-source, etc. You know, I would like to work in a company that supports open-source, this is a strong point, isn't it? But over those 8 months, no company decided to follow that idea, so I did remove it. Another idea was using Carbon ads in the documentation. Based on my statistics, it would provide around 250$ before taxes per month. Given the amount, I prefer to keep the documentation ad-free 🤣 As presented, I made other attempts towards this goal, all unsuccessful.
I know that pain quite well! Therefore, I want to limit number of impacted users to the bare minimum. Hoping that those companies will follow the license and help with project development. |
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Feel free to ignore this, I know my situation isn't in the majority:
I'd gladly pay this as long as I'm developing a project that uses QuestPDF. Once I hand the project over to the client, I'd hate for them to be bothered by these sorts of details. Since their changes shouldn't be meaningful as far as PDF structure goes (they're more likely to want to swap out logos and the like, which I should allow on my side), maybe me providing them a "compiled assembly" as an entry-point is the way to go. I'm also fine with paying for 4 licenses since I have 4 clients and $250/development_timespan_month is a drop in the bucket. In this way, you get paid, I don't have to worry about typeSetting or PDF-specific concerns, the client won't be tempted to try to update it without contact me or they'll have to pay for it themselves (I see this as reasonable), and if I get hit by a bus, then they can open that box if they want to. My clients are much more likely to want to update a calculation to reflect something along the lines of "Oh, we don't want the PDF to show I feel like this is a fair compromise. |
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@MarcinZiabek I'm more supportive of open core projects (like GitLab, but with sensible tiers), as they are more clear whether one can use them or not and cannot be used in a commercial project accidentally. Furthermore your question about the planned pricing in the survey is very ambiguous. Is it per developer or is it a single licence for the whole company? |
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How did you arrive at this threshold? For example a company with two software developers in the US would need at least that amount of revenue just to break even, assuming a yearly salary around 100k. The price of a couple of thousand dollars yearly is just out of the question for us. How do we know you will not change your mind again next year and stop supporting the project but keep charging the fee? |
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This makes a lot of sense. Offering paid license without any support, even at much lower price, is technically still viable for me. It does not require additional work from my side. Of course, assuming that companies will actually use that license. I still wonder how many companies are complying with the license, and how many care about the support. What pricing would you recommend in the per-team-but-without-the-support model? Choosing proper pricing is quite difficult, isn't it? I am a little worried about becoming a slave of my own project 🤣 If I sell many licenses at lower price, the amount of work related to providing support may be unbearable compared to the associated income. Also, the more companies decide to use the support, the less time I have to develop new features. I am not sure how should I describe my concerns. My current job is fantastic. I am happy with my responsibilities, challenges, and the salary rate. The team is also great, everyone friendly and professional. Increasing QuestPDF important is risky, it could be switching from great to worse.
This is a possible option. Of course, it increases the licensing complexity, and also requires proper definition. Is the license scaled per team size, or only per number of developers implementing PDF generation. What if that number changes over time? What pricing would you recommend in the per-developer model?
I did not use IronPDF so I cannot present my opinion about it. I only know that it is based on Chromium, so this is a sophisticated version of the html-to-pdf conversion approach, with all its benefits and downsides. On the other hand, I was using Telerik products. Let's just say that the pain was my inspiration for implementing QuestPDF 🤣 I agree, they are feature-rich, but often quite unstable.
Thank you for kind words 🥰 This was the plan, define a very limited feature scope and then provide possibly best development experience. And I don't want to stop there - it is the time to expand that scope, including features you have listed. P.S. I was hoping for this type of discussion! |
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It is quite challenging to pick a proper threshold and appropriate price. 250k USD allows to hire a team with 7 developers (average salary) in Poland, so this amount is considered as quite a lot. In India that would be at least 10 developers. Nowadays, many companies outsource the development to cheaper countries. When you describe the US situation, indeed the 250k per year seems be unsuitable. Thank you for noticing! So, either the price should be much lower, and/or the threshold much higher, right? Which option in your opinion is better? The biggest unknown is the amount of time needed to offer support per company/license. I don't know if it is a couple of hours weekly or monthly (which is a huge difference). Increasing the price is a way to mitigate the risk. Provided numbers is just a starting point. I am more than happy to learn your perspective and try to find values that work best. Feel free to share your proposition 😁
Fair point! Of course, this concern is true for nearly every library. That being said, the risk is significantly smaller when the product comes from an established company. The only thing I can do at this moment, is to be transparent and work hard for your trust. Of course, the ultimate goal is to minimize my time spent on the product support. This can be achieved by improving documentation, recording video tutorials, improving default library behavior to be more predictable, etc. So you are able to find answers immediately, instead of contacting with me / community. On the other hand, you can easily imagine that I may not be able to introduce every requested feature, for multiple reasons. Some functionalities may require a complete architecture redesign, and therefore be not viable at that moment. Other feature requests could be client-specific and not benefit other users, etc. Please notice that the library will still be open-source and will welcome any contributions. My natural goal will be to find new users. Improving quality and extending feature-set is just crucial. Would you like to propose any solutions to this problem? It is not about creating and selling the product, rather about keeping the project healthy. |
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Me neither, just checked what a general, full fledged PDF library for a similar planned price can do.
Yeah, we're coming from Telerik too. We did not have stability problems with it, it still generates most of our PDFs with essentially no problems as only a small portion of our rendering backend is switched to QuestPDF. We've migrated away from using for Excel files for a long time though, as we had many problems with it. As we are migrating away from .NET Framework we need a solution which works on newer .NET versions. We can buy a newer version of Tekerik which supports .NET (essentially a one time purchase if we don't want new features or OS/framework support after the initial 1 year), or use a different solution, which I would highly prefer as I don't like some of the quirks of it, but not to a solution which costs more on the long run, but has fewer features.
Unfortunately I cannot and should not give you any guidance on pricing as I have little experience in this area, which is very complex only just based on your questions listed here (and many of the things you probably won't think of and have to deal with later). I could only show you my point of view as a possible commercial, but not a huge enterprise user of your fantastic library. An additional story which may helps you on deciding the pricing: GitLab (the open core project) originally had 3 tiers of paid subscriptions, but as they focused their efforts on big enterprises they slashed the lowest tier (comments on HN), essentially chasing away smaller companies from their business. The current planned pricing model of QuestPDF reminds me of this story.
If that is the case this is even a harder decision then. I can only wish good luck to you in this situation and journey and keep up your good work and work-life balance. 🙂 |
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In this comment, Jim (from SixLabors) has shared many important insights about their license and pricing tiers. The more I think about it, the more I want to follow his steps. It is great to have somebody who already went through this challenging process and is willing to share the know-how. The pricing tier should be adjusted accordingly to QuestPDF feature set. And of course, be scaled down accordingly for smaller teams. Once again, thank you for showing how ridiculous was my initial proposition 😅 Would you like to take a look?
Thank you, that really means a lot! I was a little bit worried about negative uproar of the community. Instead, I got a constructive discussion and a lot of help 🥰 |
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Marcin,
I've enjoyed watching the project evolve over time.
The desktop application where I use QuestPDF was converted from Java.
Initially, I had a very limited budget. I specifically chose only MIT or
Apache projects when possible because I expect there will be fewer than 100
users.
From the initial version of QuestPDF it has done everything I needed to do
for making a simple report. QuestPDF along with Units.NET and Helix toolkit
have given this project a nice polish. Now that I know the project won't be
scrapped I can go back and provide support to the projects which made this
project possible.
I like the MIT license. But I also understand and would support the move to
a hybrid license because it still makes a project like mine possible.
Laurence
…On Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 1:31 PM Marcin Ziąbek ***@***.***> wrote:
Leading a popular open-source project is a blessing, but also involves
additional responsibilities and requires a lot of time. I would like to
ensure QuestPDF stability and future development, and allow the project to
reach its fullest potential. I am looking for ways to increase its priority
in my life, a way that is financially safe and time viable.
I am considering a hybrid license, so to minimize the impact: keep
open-source nature, offer fully-featured library for free for commercial
usage for the vast majority of users, and fund the development by being
professional and by offering priority support for largest businesses.
I started this discussion to assess available options before performing
any changes. You can find the full story here.
<https://www.questpdf.com/project-future-post.html>
------------------------------
@bennetbo <https://github.com/bennetbo> @girlpunk
<https://github.com/girlpunk> @rstm-sf <https://github.com/rstm-sf>
@AntonyCorbett <https://github.com/AntonyCorbett> Your help is
exceptional! Thank you for your engagement in features development and
providing an excellent Community support. Would you like to share your
perspective about ensuring library stability?
@matkoch <https://github.com/matkoch> @maartenba
<https://github.com/maartenba> Your decision to showcase the project in
the JetBrains OSS Power-Ups was essential to help it achieve broader user
base. Thank you for your trust and giving me a chance. Please share your
opinion.
@Laptop765 <https://github.com/Laptop765> @markgould
<https://github.com/markgould> @GilchristT <https://github.com/GilchristT>
@TaylorEdm <https://github.com/TaylorEdm> @pespinho
<https://github.com/pespinho> @NaseemHajoj
<https://github.com/NaseemHajoj> @thomasstevens89
<https://github.com/thomasstevens89> @OrganizationUsername
<https://github.com/OrganizationUsername> @insulationman
<https://github.com/insulationman> @knoxyz <https://github.com/knoxyz>
@HYDRA2568 <https://github.com/HYDRA2568> @innercitypressure
<https://github.com/innercitypressure> @great-work-told-is
<https://github.com/great-work-told-is> You are/were QuestPDF sponsors. I
highly appreciate your financial help, you really give me motivation to
push forward! What is your opinion about financing open-source development?
@SvizelPritula <https://github.com/SvizelPritula> @schulz3000
<https://github.com/schulz3000> @knoxyz <https://github.com/knoxyz>
@loxsmoke <https://github.com/loxsmoke> @CollinAlpert
<https://github.com/CollinAlpert> @emanueleguastella
<https://github.com/emanueleguastella> @danielchalmers
<https://github.com/danielchalmers> @simusr2 <https://github.com/simusr2>
@fredericoregateiro <https://github.com/fredericoregateiro> @warrantyvoids
<https://github.com/warrantyvoids> @SvizelPritula
<https://github.com/SvizelPritula> @schulz3000
<https://github.com/schulz3000> @donmurta <https://github.com/donmurta>
@jcl-aadlab <https://github.com/jcl-aadlab> @lmingle
<https://github.com/lmingle> @avobelk <https://github.com/avobelk>
@thomasstevens89 <https://github.com/thomasstevens89> @Dismall
<https://github.com/Dismall> @pha3z <https://github.com/pha3z> @qcz
<https://github.com/qcz> @pespinho <https://github.com/pespinho> Thank
you for contributing to QuestPDF and offering your help. Even small changes
are meaningful when done by many. What is your perspective in this topic?
@jnyrup <https://github.com/jnyrup> @wieslawsoltes
<https://github.com/wieslawsoltes> You have much more experience in the
open-source world. I would love to know your opinion. Please share your
thoughts.
@JimBobSquarePants <https://github.com/JimBobSquarePants> You went
through a similar process with the ImageSharp
<https://github.com/SixLabors/ImageSharp> library. Would you like to
share your experience and conclusions? How viable is this movement? How
many companies decide to purchase the Enterprise license? Do you have any
licensing concerns or recommendations?
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Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts 🥰 I am glad that the library was a successful choice in your project! Of course, old prior versions of the library keep the untouched MIT license (I don't want to and I can't do much about packages that are already released). I am also planning to support the So, even biggest companies with limit budget have a choice, just use older version without all bells and whistles introduced in 2023. And once you decide that new features and/or support are important, you can go with the paid Enterprise license 😁 |
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While I haven't used this library for a while, I must say I really enjoyed working with it. It should be noted that a license along the lines of "MIT unless you have a lot of money" will not be considered FOSS by any common definition. You say that open source projects could use this library, but that isn't acually true, as it's license would be incompatible with most projects licences. Therefore, I would have to recommend an oposite approach. Instead of adding limitations to permissive licences, you should consider adding/selling exceptions to a strong copyleft license. Since QuestPDF would probably be commonly used on servers, this would probably be the AGPL. While this would mean that any company of any size could still use QuestPDF for free, it would also mean that they would have to release the application as FOSS to anyone who receives their binary or connects to their server, which would make it unviable to use in proprietary software, unless they buy a different license from you. It should be noted that this might not affect the usage of QuestPDF in internal tools, since these are never shared with anyone. |
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@SvizelPritula Thank you for sharing your thoughts. Hey, I still remember your effort related to font styles, you have been one of the first contributors 😁
You are completely right. This is open-source but not FOSS.
The ImageSharp library has introduced a potential solution to this problem. Making the long story short, when the ImageSharp library is a transitive dependency, it is completely free, no strings attached. We should also consider statistics. QuestPDF is usually a direct dependency. There are only 2 related packages with more than 10k downloads. The impact in this regard is quite minimal.
The problem is that the AGPL license is basically hated by everyone, with its own concerns. Many (including me) says that AGPL is free for basically no one. Also, this is quite close to the EPPlus use-case, when the library switched to a similar to AGPL license. This topic have been raised countless of times in my posts on reddit 🤣
Limiting the commercial usage may potentially kill the project by greatly limiting the user-base, lowering download statistics, etc. Also, this is a quite radical change and the community may quickly fork the project and create an alternative MIT release. I would like to avoid that at all costs, bad PR is usually impossible to fix. |
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It's true that AGPL has some bad press and I understand you don't want to label QuestPDF as AGPL software. However, I feel like it's dishonest to call a non-comercial license the MIT license. I must say that the ImageSharp license seems very strange. The Apache license allows redistribution without any (relevant) conditions other than attribution. According to the ImageSharp license, the libraries are licensed under Apache to anyone who incorporates the library into open source software. This implies that my friend could use ImageSharp to create a Hello world app by copying the ImageSharp source code into his project and publish the app under the Apache license. I could then copy the ImageSharp source code from his project and use it commercially without restrictions. Even with a license with better wording it would be simple to create a open source wrapper that mimics QuestPDFs API 1 to 1. If you choose to go with the non-FOSS license route, I would recommend at least adding the GPL or AGPL as an option to allow this library to be used in copyleft software. |
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I understand reasons behind GPL software. I just don't want to deal with all misconceptions and prejudice.
Please notice that the new license is not non-commercial. It will still be completely free for commercial usage, given your yearly profits are low enough. One of the other users has rightfully pointed that my proposed threshold is too low. It should be high enough to target only bigger companies that can easily afford paying for a library, getting a stable dependency in return.
It really is! So there are obvious loopholes. If you are technically obligated to purchase the Enterprise license, you have at least three options to avoid doing so:
In my mind, the license should be written in such a way that everybody can understand it. I am not a lawyer and writing more sophisticated rules could be risky, with very little additional benefit. |
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The ImageSharp license is specifically designed to be non-viral to ensure downstream OSS projects are not negatively affected by the change. This obviously introduces a loophole. However.
It's simply not worth concerning about. |
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This is exactly how I interpret Six Labors license. Thank you for detailed explanation! I remember when it was positively commented by |
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I'm a one man shop who has only four clients who are handled after my day job. All of the clients are mechanical/structural engineering firms with revenue in the millions per year with $0/year coming from software offerings. They all have either a legal department or lawyer on retainer who care about the licenses on my dependencies. Only one of them has an in-house developer who understands both code and licenses.
I'm worried that with upcoming licensing changes, the code that I provide them at the completion of a job will not be enough for them to maintain the solution I've created for them and might make it impossible.
I'm already sick of explaining why I'm using an old version of EPPlus and why they shouldn't update it. I'd hate for Legal to tell my customers that they aren't allowed to make small changes and edit it because of a word like "AGPL" anywhere.
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My advice.
P.S FOSS and the OSI approved set of licenses are not the same thing. |
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Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I appreciate your effort 🥰
This is something new in the open-source world, highly controversial. But, as a creator/producer, I realize how true your statement is.
This is something that bothers me the most. The priority support is usually considered as an important part of a paid product. Something, that enterprise users expect. On the other hand, you are completely right about required resources. It is surprisingly difficult to estimate how much time is required to support one client monthly. I fear that support-related activities will be more and more time demanding, essentially creating a trap for me. Thank you for highlighting this problem and associated risks.
Right now, QuestPDF offers only a subset of features available in paid products. Granted, the community evaluates that existing features are much better than what paid competitors offer. And of course, the goal is to slowly close the gap. Do you think that I should follow pricing tiers similar to Six Labors? 5000$ per year is comparable to the most known alternative IronPDF. Again, QuestPDF does not offer all features and (following your suggestion) the license will not include paid support. Following the most common sense, the QuestPDF pricing should be significantly lower (e.g. 2000-3000$ per year). Not to mention, your pricing covers a couple of libraries, equally complex. On the other hand, I am not sure if this makes that much of a difference for enterprise. In terms of a second tier (digital agencies, etc.), it should be accordingly lower. I am not sure, how much do you know about QuestPDF. If possible, would you please propose the pricing tier that may work best in your opinion. I really don't want to overshoot and your opinion could be a great starting point. All things considered, I am highly impressed by your work. I start to realize how though the decision must have been. The license is indeed atypical, but I understand reasons behind each decision. Your actions inspired me months ago. Now, I would like to follow your approach (license and pricing tiers/rules). Would that be okay for you? |
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Blessing from China. In the Internet era, the size of the user base determines how big the future space of software development is. If software is only developed for a few companies, it is difficult to have a good future, because there are so many components on the market, and if the cost is so high that there is no business to be had if you develop it yourself. You can set the basic engine for free, such as preview, or offer local reporting for an extension tool fee. This can be reasonable business, the engine ensures a sufficient user base, the tools on the engine business fee can in turn promote the growth of the engine and you can get continuous resources. In China, most of the engines are free, and the accompanying improved software is charged a certain fee, but the fee is not high, as long as enough mass can ensure the development. A large number of users will provide massive user experience and rapidly improve the quality of software. This is mutual. |
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The current section is still free, preview, visual report generation tools can charge fees. |
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Re support. Just make sure your docs are good and your API is predictable and simple. I get only a handful of requests for information in my trackers with nearly 47 million downloads. Remember. The code is available which is more than can be said for closed sourced alternatives. Re pricing, I really cannot comment there. I'd probably drop it a little due to the feature matrix but whatever you choose, you have to stick with it. I would keep the agency tier proportional to that cost. |
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You're right in that commercial support is a big part of what many of these libraries offer, but that also includes things like 4 hour response times, 24x7 availability, and guaranteed turnaround (fix) times. Realistically, none of those are things you can offer, so it's likely a more sensible approach to not offer paid support at all and reduce the licence fee appropriately. |
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My five (non significant cents) on this: Look at the product of bogus library (github) . What is suggest you do is create pre-made templates for various documents, and put them in a seperate library. If this is something that could be an option, I'd recommend reaching out to the guy who made bogus. Hope you find a good solution :-) |
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Also, regarding choice of open source licence, it's perfectly possible to choose a open source license which prevents other people from modifying or redistributing it for commercial reasons (reselling it). See choosealicense.org for some alternatives, they're reasonably well explained. |
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QuestPDF is unique with its HMTL less template and fluent API approach making it easy to consume and the previewer making prototyping experience the first of its kind. Thanks MarcinZiabek for the undeniable work and effort so far. I would wish for it to stay open source and we can actually help to contribute to it and hopefully @microsoft can adopt it just like Polly as a standard for PDF generation in the .NET ecosystem. You can start up a GitHub sponsorship program and we can be part of it. Even selling merchandise can also be a way of sustaining this wonderful project. |
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Large corporation perspective here (so large that the survey is blocked by our internet filter). I'm looking for something to replace iText Sharp because they changed the license from LGPL to AGPL a while back, making open source use impossible for us (although I only work on internal tools, our lawyers would not OK the use of AGPL). We are still using the old LGPL version, but that has potential problems too. The problem with large corporations is not that we can't afford to buy a license, it's that spending that money is very difficult. I'd have to go to our purchasing department and they and the lawyers would review and potentially want to negotiate the license with you. You would also be subjected to our vendor management process, and "some dude maintaining the software in his spare time" is unlikely to be seen as an acceptable risk there. Who knows what else they would require in order to be able to spend a few hundred dollars! In other words, I probably wouldn't even bother trying. You will probably have more luck with the startups that have lots of cash but haven't built the corporate structures to crush productivity yet! :-) |
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Less risk than someone not getting paid to maintain the library. Risk isn't reduced by obfuscating from your purchasing department. If anything, you're massively introducing risk by utilizing only permissive licensed software that comes AS-IS. |
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Absolutely, and if this was a product for our customers then I would likely use a commercial library backed by a stable company, although obviously there we use a lot of open source libraries too since many are better than anything available commercially. These are just tools for my department, so the risk is limited. I'm just saying that a license change like this will limit usage while perhaps not providing as much reward as hoped for, but hopefully not all companies are like mine! It's probably better for the long-term success of the library to foster a true open-source community around it, but I can see the attraction in wanting to make a living from your labor of love, so I'm not saying they should go one way or the other. Just providing my perspective, however skewed it may be from a lifetime in corporate America! :-) |
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A couple of weeks have passed since the beginning of this discussion and the related survey. I would like to thank everybody for being so active and sharing various important perspectives. Making the decision is surprisingly difficult, especially when being able to only guess about the future and broader community reaction. When you care about the project very much, and feel highly uncertain about its future, it takes a great effort to do every little step... But it has finally happened, I made a first significant step towards the hybrid licensing model. There is a new Pricing page that hopefully explains everything clearly and concisely. If anybody has any questions or suggestions, now it is the perfect time to make final touches. Please share your opinion 😁 In the meantime, I am cooperating with Paddle to setup the payment process. My second priority is to address a couple of bugs and prepare a next Special thanks to |
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Currently we would be under the $500/year plan - which is less than I am sponsoring today. Will the sponsorship feature stay enabled? If so I am thinking we will move to the Professional license and I will just reduce the sponsorship down to $50/month until we have a need to move to the Enterprise license. |
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@markgould First of all, let me thank you for believing in the project and being the highest sponsor along with JetBrains. I wish more people and companies will realize the existence of programs similar to GitHub Sponsors. Maybe some day, library developers will forget about saving their projects by following dual-licensing approach. At this moment, I am planning to keep the GitHub Sponsors account enabled. I don't see any reason to remove it, although I am not planning to actively promote its existence, as its effectiveness is mediocre. Please feel free to decide about the future of your sponsorship. From my perspective, just following the license already means a lot 🥰 |
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As part of the transition, I am working on the improved developer experience related to the updated licensing. Just after nuget installation, during document generation, the library throws an exception that describes both licenses, available options and informs how to set up license configuration. The purpose of this exception is to make sure that new and existing users are fully aware about the license. This option does The current exception message is as follows:
As @JimBobSquarePants has mentioned, there is no reason to enforce any license keys of any sort. Therefore, the license configuration is quite straighforward: QuestPDF.Settings.License = LicenseType.Community;For more information, please refer to the following commit 76844dc and its associated branch. I am happy to hear your feedback. Maybe the whole idea with an exception is unnecessary? Maybe the exception message should be redacted differently or misses something important? Any ideas are very welcome 😁 Once again, thank you for your patience and help! |
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Thank you for double-checking the content. And yes, I think that this is correct 😁 The idea is that the library is still free for commercial usage via the Community License as long as your company does have less than 1M USD annual gross revenue. The exact wording is put in the The reason behind this decision is to be as close as possible to the original open-source MIT roots, while finding ways to fund the project. This is a balance between being open-source and business. An approach that hopefully will be accepted by the community, and will end up with at least a couple of licenses sold per month. Do you have any suggestions on how I can explain rules in a cleaner way? What do you think about the revenue threshold and chosen pricing? (you are a highly active community member so I value your opinion a lot) |
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This is highly inspired by what |
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Ah right, I guess I read that as non-commercial is free, commercial under 1M is $500, over 1M is $3000. In terms of the revenue thresholds, that seems reasonable imho. I doubt I'll have any issues immediately purchasing the professional plan. |
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That would certainly increase the funding but... at a cost of negative uproar from the dotnet community. That would be really close to the EPPlus PR fiasco. I dare say, I would feel remorse after following that approach. You're right! I should have put that detail in the comparison section as well. The issue is, that paragraph is quite long. Maybe something like |
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I reviewed another .NET PDF library that costs over $4k per year for up to 10 developers. And without even comparing the costs, I thought QuestPdf had better features. Features like Ensure Space, Show Entire, Show Once. $500 is a bargain for this software. Companies, like the one I work for, want responsive support. For me, I want to pay for a license to ensure that the software gets timely bug fixes and feature enhancements along with responsive support. Companies want to ensure that the time they are investing in writing code for a solution will work long enough to pay off on the investment. The license is only a small portion of the overall investment. Typically, I only buy commercial for this reason. I've made an exception here because the software is really really good. Paying $500 was the easy decision. |
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Marcin, First of all I want to thank you and also let you know that you really built a great peace of software. I just moved some parts of a project from a commercial nuget to yours due the MIT license. So my opinion will probably be biased ;-) Anyway, I think it is fair that you want to get funding for the software and personally I think also the pricing is ok for larger companies. My personal issue is that I think in the end people may miss reading the license terms and just think it's MIT so it's free. Companies just want to be sure that they are licensed correctly and these things are somehow hard to track. Often in startups you have Dev's taking the components, not knowing about the revenue and once it passes 1mio nobody thinks about it. Personally I would prefer to have addons that you need to pay for which are also a game-change. Like mentioned that could be previewer which I would also pay even if not in the 1mio limit, because it makes you save a lot of time. The signing probably something larger companies use, so fair to pay for it. So to sum up, obviously it would prefer that it stays MIT/free forever, but I fully understand your position, so just make sure it does not get a mess between the two licenses. Thanks |
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Hi 😀 Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts!
From my perspective, the decision was simple: either let the project slowly die, or try to find funding and spend more time on it. So far, only two professional licenses have been purchased, but it already gives me some hope. So I am preparing a long-term roadmap to cover the most important features and solve existing cons.
You are entirely correct: the new license was not clearly presented when you wrote the comment. The reason is simple: the latest package release on the Nuget platform was still the I followed your suggestion and updated the GitHub repository and Nuget package to clearly and transparently show the new license. I hope that it will be easy to find from now on. |
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I am not sure I understand how the MIT license works in the following scenario: if I fork your code to add some local changes and I'm not making any money, I'm able to use MIT license. But then what if some big business finds my fork and uses it? My version of the code would only be covered under MIT, which means they could bypass your proprietary license? What happens if I build an open source application and later want to dual license my app? Do I have to obtain a license for your library if one of my licensees meets the revenue requirement? Do I tell them they need to contact you for a license for the PDF part? |
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This is a fair question; thank you for sharing it 😀 It is infrequent that somebody makes a fork and builds a new library/product out of it, so I am not much concerned. I am not planning to take any legal actions, nor even attempting to find such usages. You don't need to purchase the QuestPDF Commercial license if you utilize the library in a transitive manner. For example, you create an invoicing library with QuestPDF nuget dependency and publish that library as another nuget package. In this case, your users don't need to purchase the QuestPDF library. However, it would be very welcome if your library clearly states somewhere in the documentation that supporting QuestPDF via purchasing its license will increase the quality and stability of their platform. A similar discussion has been raised on the SixLabors GitHub page: SixLabors/ImageSharp#2151 I have decided to follow their steps and simplify the licensing terms as much as possible. Especially these comments are interesting from Bob: |
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Thank you. This is very helpful. |
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Update: as part of the new dual-licensing introduction, I have performed the following actions:
I want to thank everybody for helping me in this tremendous effort! You are great 🥰 |
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Imagine this, I have raised these THESE SAME CONCERNS almost 9 months ago, and author "assured me " (more like shrugged it off) that it is not going to happen: If I was not one asking, and I was not getting down-voted I would have not said anything here. Hiveminds do hivemind stuff, but this is a good time for me to learn my lesson and trust my 10 years of experience more than some community hivemind. |
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Thank you for presenting your concerns. The comment mentioned above from 9 months ago was honest. I was planning to keep the MIT license at all costs. If anything is a lesson here, it is doing a FOSS project. Suffice it to say it was an eye-opener for me, from both positive and negative perspectives. One can be amazed about how open and friendly the community is, something truly remarkable. But soon after, the maintainer realizes that working on a successful open-source project is not fun anymore but a pile of responsibilities. It was discussed many time recently, and raised by developers way more important than me. People doing open-source are exceptionally skilled, usually having satisfying and highly-paid jobs. And their responsibility is first to offer proper value to their employees, making the open-source project always of lower priority. I also faced this dilemma: let the project die or do something to make it healthy. I did my best to consult with the community before taking any action. It includes creating a survey, GitHub discussion and proper communication banner in the documentation. For three months, everybody had a chance to share their opinion, and I am glad that so many developers decided to present their perspectives in a friendly manner. I was even prepared to completely forget the dual-licensing idea in case of solid and negative community feedback. But what happened is visible in this discussion: so many people decided to help me iron everything out to minimize the impact and still be community-friendly. Thank you all for your help!
I did not downvote your Reddit comment. Maybe somebody from the community decided to. Please don't blame me or the project.
I am sorry that @Uraharadono is not open to affable and professional discussion. You rightfully presented your concerns, but please change your tone. We are not enemies. |
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@JimBobSquarePants Thank you so much for helping me respond to this comment and pointing us to the facts. Highly appreciated! |
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@MarcinZiabek I did say nothing wrong in my comment above, nor did I insult you in any way, shape or form. What I have issues with is that I can post screenshot of a simple search of QuestPDF posts by you (who were marketing as I have said in my Reddit comment) on Reddit and 99% of your post have "open source", "MIT license" or "completely free" variations in titles. Actually, here is screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/Wk5u35D.png I don't have anything against you wanting to get paid for your work, that is fine. We all want to get paid for what we do. But I don't think it is morally right to change licensing all of the sudden (without even locking the free version), when you have literally marketed and gained popularity for your whole project as open source and free. I was lucky enough to have never moved my project from GemBox to QuestPdf just because it would cost me 3 times as much now. |
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It doesn't matter who you are insulting. From everybody, I expect a professional tone. Sharing concerns and negative feedback is very welcome as long as done with proper respect for everyone.
It is all correct. I was sharing my work with the Dotnet community, promoting the library and making it useful. At that time, every adjective mentioned in your message precisely described the project's status.
Did you have a chance to read the content of this discussion? Or at least the content of the Pricing page? It clearly states that every library version released before the license change (so every major version up to and including 2022.12) is still available for free under the MIT license. I do not force anybody to upgrade 😁
In every way, QuestPDF is offered under a significantly lower price, while of course feature matrices of both libraries are different. So please, don't share misinformation. Best, |
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If, at any point, you have felt cheated because of my actions or way of communication, I am very sorry for that. Hopefully, this discussion's content will describe the situation and explain my decisions. The license change process was challenging; many people have been involved and immensely helped. |
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I understand where you're coming from in feeling like you need to provide some sort of revenue stream to move the project forward, but I will say that I'm disappointed. It comes across as a bait-and-switch tactic where we get hooked on a great thing, only for the carpet to get pulled out from under us and told to pay up or else. I have no issue with new projects starting off directly with a commercial model. That's clear up front and there's no misaligned expectations. We'd have known from the start what we'd be paying for. What's not good is promoting it as free forever, drumming up popularity of the project, then shifting gears towards charging for it and ostracizing a big part of your base. I discovered QuestPDF on Reddit and it seemed like a breath of fresh air. It seemed easy to use, nicely structured code, and best of all it was modern and free. That was a big help at a time when we were still using old versions of iTextSharp and were trying to look for a less expensive path forward. See, the big problem with instituting a charge for your library half-way through is not just that it provides doubt for the future, but that it causes one to consider what they're getting for the amount they're paying for. It was a no-brainer to choose Quest being free over other expensive enterprise choices. But now there's hardly a reason for us to choose Quest when the $3000+ it'll cost us yearly is just as expensive, if not more, than other competitors out there in the enterprise market. Arguably, some others offer more than what Quest does, but why not get more for what you pay for? Maybe this would have been less of an issue if your prices were lower, but you're pricing yourself pretty high in an enterprise market and I don't see that ending as well as you think it will. I don't want this to come across as "Aww the poor $1M+ company can't afford $3k a year" since we absolutely can, but it's a hard sell to buy Quest over anything else if we're back to evaluating everything available on the paid market. |
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I am very sorry that your experience with the license change has been negative. This situation was indeed a moral dilemma, and I fully understand your concerns. I expected that a part of the community might be impacted and unhappy about this direction change. From my perspective, it was to let the project die or do something to keep it healthy. I have learned a lot about open-source over the last three years during QuestPDF development, and now I understand that this approach, although beautiful, needs to be more self-supporting. I wish there were another way. However, I need to emphasize. My actions were not a bait-and-switch tactic. It was not my intention to gain popularity and then switch the license. Quite the opposite, the popularity and increased responsibility have forced me to make this decision. Every company using the library, that does not want to support its development, can safely stay at the 2022.12.X release. I will not (and can not) change nor hide old releases which are always available under the MIT license. I plan to provide additional quality support for at least a couple of months for the 2022.12.X release to lower risks. You can also find a 2022.12.X branch on the GitHub repository, which can be forked and adjusted/modified/fixed.
Yes, I understand that the project could not be considered FOSS anymore, and now it needs to compete with paid solutions. This license change is my attempt to make the project successful and valuable for the entire community. I decided to dedicate myself and focus more on feature development and overall quality to narrow the gap between QuestPDF and alternatives while still trying to be community-friendly. It is not a business, I am not expecting to sell hundreds of licenses. In fact, selling only 20 Enterprise licenses a year is all I need to keep the project alive and healthy.
Would you please suggest what pricing would be more suitable for the Enterprise tier? What, in your opinion, should the library offer to be more competitive? Thank you a lot for sharing your feedback. I highly appreciate it. Best, Marcin |
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That's the tricky part, since I wouldn't want to see QuestPDF turn into a Swiss army knife doing more than PDF stuff, but for the price point that's what a lot of other libraries chose to do. Others have come up with their own common document layout and from there have multiple renderers, PDF being the primary choice but with options for image, Word documents, etc. |
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There are indeed multiple available paths to follow. Creating a do-it-all library may not be feasible for countless reasons. My experience with paid products like this is rather negative. All those formats are highly complex, and introducing a standard abstraction layer requires a lot of work, not to mention keeping that layer up-to-date with all format changes, like in Word documents. My current high-priority roadmap covers the following:
If you see any other important features or areas of improvement, please don't hesitate to share. I am very open to any feedback, both regarding the library as well as its licensing. |
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I just spent an hour reading through the different opinions. It is very interesting to look at the different points of view! I myself am active in the open source area and can understand that the maintainer has decided to take this step, even if I would be happy if there had been another way. The real problem is that you have to force people to pay for a project they use. Unfortunately, very few companies invest money back into the open source projects they use. In the end you get angry about the way the project is going to be financed. Which from my point of view most maintainers don't want. Shortly a question about licensing |
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Without a doubt, the license is all about the time of active development: software creation, adding new features and maintenance. So once the compiled application is delivered to the client, it should be okay to stop purchasing the renewals. It is not a lifetime subscription. Moreover, my expectation is that even if a modification is done to the application code, and that modification is not related to PDF generation, it is also not needed to continue the license purchases.
So in some sense, this license is perpetual, right? |
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That makes sense. Following this description, the license tier should also be chosen based on the developer's count on that specific organization side, right? So, if we have a contractor that creates and sells the software to a non-software company, the lower licensing tier is sufficient. A different story is, when a software company with many programmers, uses the library for their own purpose, e.g. business. |
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@MarcinZiabek Yes. A license is perpetual for a given version of that license.
Yes. Six Labors license requirements are determined by size of the end-user organization only.
This is where you and I differ, and I don't think your interpretation is wise as it introduces ambiguity which users will avoid. Six Labors Subscriptions are required for the lifetime of the software. That means they must be renewed for as long as the software is in use (included within any published active application) by the end-user organization. |
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I see your point, thank you for pointing out the different in our interpretations. As far as I understand, your approach differs significantly from other libraries. Let's analyze Aspose licenses as an example (from https://purchase.aspose.com/buy): The lifetime subscription may be a no-no for many businesses from a psychological point of view, even though they may want to pay periodically to receive access to library updates. Suppose that, as a freelancer, I develop commercial software for a client with over a million USD in revenue. In such a case, once the software is done and completed, it will still generate costs, something many may not expect. This does not feel like an investment anymore but rather like... (well) a subscription service. When paying for JetBrains products, I am aware of the perceptual license. I can stop paying and use the latest version within the licensing period. However, as a happy customer, I want to receive all updates and support the development process, so I am deciding to continue purchasing the license renewal. This is significantly different than using Adobe products as a subscription, no paying = no software. Do you have any experience with your approach? I am trying to understand all those corner cases better, to keep the license open and friendly. |
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There's plenty of licenses out there that are subscription based. There's plenty that are not. What you need to do is to stop caring about what people think your software is worth and think about what you think it's worth. Charge that with whatever license you see fit. If the software is as good as you think and fulfills a requirement, then people will pay. Just make sure your interpretation of the license matches the terms of the license because if you've copied the language used in the Six Labors one then it must work the same way. If I have any advice at all it would be to close and lock this discussion. There is nothing positive to be gained from further discussion and further license changes will simply lead to more subscriber distrust. |
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Would like to add some notes here. First fully support the change and direction. There is detailed story in the issue LICENSE_change_notice of the project. Option b) is And its completely fine to switch from a) to b) once a projects grows over self-managed capability. Explanation: So the best way with b) is Dual license (c)FOSS. We can call this loosely enforced funding. *-I believe model like this is an excellent solution, almost without any downsides. One could further work out more complicated scenarios such as when Library is used as dependency in another library with FOSS and then that other library is used by a company with high revenue. What would be the best rules of engagement for those edge cases. To make it somewhat standardized, or al least have few option that the project owner can choose from. |
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and others
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Please read a full story behind this discussion, click here (this post has been removed from the webpage, link will return 404 from now on)
As a project owner and primary developer, I am responsible for ensuring QuestPDF stability and availability in the future. I would like to dedicate more of my time, and provide proper support and maintenance over the upcoming years. However, this decision needs to be time viable and financially safe.
I am seriously considering a hybrid licensing model. Recently more and more open-source projects are choosing this path.
For the vast majority of users, nothing changes. The library is still open-source, fully featured, and free for commercial usage (via the MIT license).
The only difference is applied to enterprise. Every company/individual with high enough (value yet to be determined) annual gross revenue that uses QuestPDF in a closed-source for-profit project will be obligated to purchase the QuestPDF Enterprise license for each year of development. This version will provide additional, professional, high-priority support.
Please share your thoughts here or via the survey 😁
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