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by francoistanguay 778 days ago
Uno founder here.

Uno as a UI framework is and will remain FOSS. It's been our strategy from day one and core to how we operate.

We see real opportunities to build productivity-focused products on top of it that will bring licensing revenues. Our Figma Design-Code plugin is a proof point and we have a lot more to come.

Thank you for caring and for the insights.

2 comments

I appreciate your statement here, but I think part of the reason the GP commented on this is that we hear this from companies all the time. We all recognize that you're speaking the truth of today, but things change. This may be important to you, but unless Uno is your lifestyle business and you maintain control despite external pressures from board members brought on as capital sources, you're not capable of providing a guarantee in perpetuity, let alone for any well defined metric of time.

It's fair for us to be gunshy. There's simply too many examples of OSS projects highly used across the web that made these kind of promises earlier on in the product's lifecycle, many if not most of them with the best of intentions at the time the promise was made. I trust that what you're saying is true today. Until we start to see more OSS projects with sustainability models that are both successful at staving off negative influence from funding partners, and those sustainability models leading to companies making good on the declarations of altruism they made when they were younger, I think we're going to remain unsure and unconfident in promises like this.

Don't think it's going to stop us from checking out your product or potentially building really cool stuff with it. But until you prove to us that you'll keep this ethos, we will start using this really cool framework with one hand while we keep another hand free to stabilize ourselves in what feels like an inevitable rugpull that isn't a matter of if, but when.

I wonder if your point of view, which I describe as "open source absolutist/optimist", has any facts to prove that your point of view is actually a thing that exists, or is fantasy...no offense. Maybe even the biggest open source projects are currently on "borrowed time"?

I'm sorry I wrote this as I didn't actually review the project and see if the source code is available. It appears to be closed source. Your concerns are definitely valid.

My comment was more directed to open source, and I would say to you that the only in-perpetuity guarantee is to fork it.

Looks awesome. How easy is it to use other libraries together with Uno? Say OpenGL for iOS and Android. Any examples? Looks very interesting.
You can embed any native component per platform.

We're actively working on bringing an unified OpenGL control in our Toolkit so it works on all platforms and be ready-to-use. Stay tuned!