Redsandro: According to your logic, if you criticize DHTMLX’s business model then that would make you a Sencha employee. Or perhaps you are an employee of Red Hat?
I am merely defending my choice of DHTMLX. I figure that the more people use it, the more advanced it will become and the lower the chances of it being discontinued. The last thing I need is for this framework to disappear after migrating all of my code.
But I have also had plenty of experience in my professional life with people thinking that open source is some kind of panacea because they don’t understand it and how it affects business, so this topic kinda hit close to home. We will just have to agree to disagree here.
If you find the ‘lite’ versions too limiting, then that’s a fair evaluation and I never said otherwise. I was only pointing out the lack of equally profitable alternatives.
Well that’s not very fair, is it? We both shared our likes about ExtJS and DHTMLX. I like DHX for a lot of the reasons mentioned here, too.
Except for the limitations of the lite version I run in to. Once I mentioned that I, as a user, find that a drawback in comparison, you start pointing out that businesses need to earn money. I went along with you to illustrate why I disagree in order to satisfy any wonders about me being just another FOSS drooler without thinking, but apart from that, I don’t and we shouldn’t even care about what business model drives their choices in order to evaluate the pros and cons.
So when you start to defend a company’s profit model in a discussion about the usability of their product for us developers, you start to emit a sense of employee-like bias.
Not every project is about investing finance and harvesting finance. Some projects are based partially or entirely on love. Sencha allows for love projects. DHX supports love up to a certain point, and then you have to pay.
I think that exact point as a plus for Sencha is what I mentioned earlier, it’s beneficial in order to make the product more popular (and lower the chances of it being discontinued). We want the same thing.
We have an entire FOSS workflow. It’s not entirely fair to bring up the suggestion that plenty of FOSS people misunderstand FOSS because you disagree. The opposite is also true: There is plenty of people who dislike FOSS because they misunderstand it and cannot imagine there can be quality in anything that doesn’t cost money.
And last but not least, it’s also a philosophy. Close to home. Hence my enthusiasm here.
So I agree to disagree. I wish both DHX and ExtJS the best. I wish they would both learn a bit from each other.
This creates incentive to produce something which is better than status quo. And it creates accountability that the product is worth the price of admission.
This directly translates into quality of my product.
We’re deteriorating into nit-picking, but: Defending the business model is the same as defending a feature-set, simply because it has many very obvious repercussions on us as developers.
And yes, even whether it is profitable or not has an effect on developers, if only because it affects whether the company has a long future or not. But also because they approach customers, support and product development differently if they are open source. And also because it affects pricing for when you do need to go commercial.
Look at Sencha. Their business model was pure open-source in 2008, but since this wasn’t profitable for several reasons, they had to give this up for both commercial and library uses, and suddenly people using it for commercial applications found themselves stranded with an old version, or having to pay unexpectedly. So here we have a real-life example of even ‘free users’ who suffered because they ignored the business model.
So I strongly disagree with this statement: “I don’t and we shouldn’t even care about what business model drives their choices in order to evaluate the pros and cons.”
The fact that you, as a free user, feel different limitations in both frameworks was never a debated point. But since, in order to change this, one would have to change the business model, the discussion naturally shifted.
And finally, since I handle part of the business at my company, I am interested in debates on business model decisions even if they may be off topic and pertain to another company. By assuming I am their employee, you are assuming everything is commercial-oriented. Think of it as ‘open-source debating’
You have some good points on which I simply agree to disagree. But some points are also wrong to use as an argument.
For example, the Sencha past is irrelevant. I am comparing the two as they are now. They are both dual-licensed. They both have a commercial license for developers who don’t want to release the source with their web-apps. This is where they earn money.
The difference is, Sencha open sourced the whole framework and DHTMLX did not.
We both want the same thing, great projects not dying out. The difference is, I say that Sencha’s choice to open source the whole thing in stead of a limited version is better, because this encourages people who use the product in open source projects to fall in love with the product. This encourages people to keep using it, because they don’t encounter limitations. And encourage those same people to get a commercial license for the product they love once they are setting up a commercial project.
The fact that you don’t trust a project can live and prosper without some kind of crippling limitation for non-paying users, is a sentiment I don’t quite understand. Because you seem to say that this kind of choice determines if the company has a future or not.
I think Red Had does a great job. Oracle’s MySQL is highly profitable without any limitations for open source use. cough Google cough. And of course, Sencha seems to do well.
Like someone at IBM said: “Most people think either open-source or commercial, but they’re not mutually exclusive.” (or something ) This is basically what uncrippled dual licensing is about (Sencha, MySQL, etc).
We can only agree to disagree if we understand each other. I brought the Sencha example simply to demonstrate why the business model is critical when considering a framework. You said it isn’t. QED.
Also, you repeatedly argue with me about a point that I already agreed with ten posts ago. I.e. The fact that free DHTMLX is more limited than free Sencha. The topic shifted to business models ages ago because that is the only area where we disagree (and that’s why the Sencha history was relevant).
As far as your comments on the viability of open source are concerned - I replied to this a few posts ago. To reiterate, you are comparing apples and oranges since the background and origins of each company and its source code are different. But this debate obviously isn’t going anywhere, so I’ll quit here.
Discussion could be updated with Ext js 5 and DHTMLX 4 which are around the corner.
Ext js 5 seems to simplifies some things and add some performance. I guess it won’t be up to a Dhtmlx level anyway On the other hand, Sencha bring Architect 3 which took a look advance now on the added values path, continue to evolve while Dhtmlx designer didn’t take any significative evolution for a long time.
How about Webix, the spinoff project from DHTMLX Touch?
It’s almost completely open-sourced (GPL), with 55 widgets and only some advanced features in the “PRO” edition: vertically rotated headers, header menu and grouped columns in DataTable, extra locales, initialization from XML, custom scrollbars, that kind of thing. TreeTable (DHTMLX’s TreeGrid) is free.
In September 2012, DHTMLX released an HTML5 JavaScript framework optimized for touchscreen and mobile devices, called DHTMLX Touch 1.2. By July 2013, touch features had been integrated directly in dhtmlxSuite, and development of DHTMLX Touch was transferred to Webix, which went on to become an alternative full-blown JavaScript GUI widget component library. Since November 25, 2014, support for DHTMLX Touch has been completely transferred to Webix. Hence the Migration page.
Finally it’s quite the same thing as dhtmlx simplified situation by letting their suite to work on both desktop and mobile; while webix works on both desktop and mobile too
This drives to a comparison. Technically i can’t tell, while on the price level, webix is more expansive so has to justify this in a way or another.
) This is basically what uncrippled dual licensing is about (Sencha, MySQL, etc).