[azan-n]

> It's also important to note that while FIX frontend is open source, it utilizes commercial Material UI components. As such, to use it, you'd need your own Material UI license.

That is an odd choice for an open-source project. I'm curious to know what Material UI provided that any other open-source UI library did not.

[lloesche]

The reasoning is explained in the very section of our Github org README you quoted this sentence from. Our main open source project is Fix Inventory (https://github.com/someengineering/fixinventory) and that is very well documented (https://inventory.fix.security) and uses no commercial 3rd party libraries.

The Fix SaaS frontend that you're referring to and that you find at https://fix.security builds upon Fix Inventory. We could have just made it closed-source like every other SaaS (think Grafana Cloud). But because I'm a big proponent of OSS we decided to open source our entire SaaS stack, frontend, backend as well as all internal tooling. The main intend here is transparency, not so you spin up your own SaaS environment.

Essentially we develop the SaaS for ourselves first and foremost, but saw no reason to make it closed source. So that is why it might be using any number of commercial 3rd party add-ons.

> I'm curious to know what Material UI provided that any other open-source UI library did not.

I believe it was some MUI X table features like multi row sorting that we didn't feel like re-implementing. I'm sure there's other open source libs that would do that, but we've settled on MUI and are not going to start mixing different UI libraries for different visual elements if we don't absolutely have to.