Avalonia

 Avalonia UI is a set of dot net libraries and tools for doing cross-platform GUIs that work on a million platforms, often without any code changes. 

They recently announced, in my opinion, a pretty severe licensing change.

https://avaloniaui.net/blog/retiring-accelerate

This is a gut-punch to me. This is an open source library that I am highly dependent on for my Poker game that I have poured thousands of hours over the past six years into. Parts of it that I depend on that used to be free are no longer free because I use it for an application that is technically a commercial, closed source project.

No one is entitled to anyone else's work for free but when you offer a library or application for free, and then later on decide to change that, you are pulling the rug out from people. They have had a free & open source part and a paid commercial part for years, and I've never needed any of the commercial parts, but now that are moving parts that used to be free into the paid commercial part. They used to have an exception where individuals and companies that made less than $1 million in annual revenue could use the tools for free, but now they are getting rid of that exception. Until last year, Avalonia had released some new products that were paid tools or add-ons, but always kept the core free.

I never would have invested so much time in this tech over 6 years, if it had had this new licensing. On a technical level, Avalonia is nothing short of astounding, one of the most absolute polished and advanced open source libraries I've ever worked with. It's a Xaml-based UI system that is a spiritual descendent of WPF, even though it's not directly compatible with WPF (except for a paid WPF compatibility layer). I really want them to succeed, I have never paid their organization any money, but it's always, from the start of development on Straight Up Poker, been my intent to "pay it forward" and give something back to Avalonia if I ever managed to make an appreciable profit. That has not happened, the application barely covers its existing operating costs, and if you add the value of my time working on this over the years, I'm deep, deep, deeply in the hole. For certain, some degree of Avalonia's success is due to the generous licensing model that they are now seemingly trying to leverage. Their blog says the changes are in part due to cheaters on the honor system, but they're punishing everyone, and the cheaters are still going to cheat, and the honest little guy gets screwed. I'm no business genius(yet, lol), but I do worry too that this licensing change is going to cause future adoption to take a hit. I have a touch of anxiety that we haven't seen the last of them making more free things not free. I used to gush over Avalonia when talking to other developers, and clients. But I can no longer recommend something that I myself have anxiety over. It really stinks too, because this is such a tootin' beautiful product. I've called it "What WPF could have been". This change does not technically stop me from developing with Avalonia, but it definitely puts a pain point in my development workflow. I think this also has potential to significantly increase Avalonia's barrier to entry. (again one of the reasons for its current user base was an extremely low barrier for over a decade) I really want them to succeed, and I really do appreciate the hard work that organization has done that I have used - for free, I want the developers to be rewarded. I just feel like this business decision didn't thoroughly take into account how it hurts the little guys.

--P