The Avalonia UI open source project, which provides a cross-platform user interface framework for .NET, is removing low-cost support options aimed at small companies and is introducing paid-only tooling, in order to balance "open source growth with commercial viability."
Mike James, CEO of the Avalonia UI company, posted about the year to date, saying that sustainability remains the biggest challenge despite a 44 percent increase in revenue and a sevenfold increase in the developer community for the project.
More users translates to more reported issues, James said, requiring more paid staff to handle the volume. The company's income comes from three main sources, according to the figures he presented, these being licenses for Avalonia XPF - which are compatible with Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) - support agreements, and projects undertaken on behalf of customers.
Avalonia UI is open source on GitHub under the MIT license, and among the most popular open source projects for .NET, but Avalonia XPF is paid-only.
The company now plans to introduce paid-only tooling and features for Avalonia UI, under the banner of Avalonia Accelerate. These tools will include a visual designer for XAML, the XML-based language for defining a UI; hot reload which reflects code changes immediately in a project being debugged, a media player, a TreeDataGrid, an advanced Rich Text control, and ahead-of-time compilation for Android applications.
These are major tools and features, and reserving them for paying users will undermine the open source status of Avalonia UI. James said that "while we'd love to make all features freely available, the math simply doesn't work."
According to James, efforts to raise more revenue while preserving the open source model have been unsuccessful. This includes a request for donations. "Despite our efforts to encourage donations to the project, only 0.0176 percent of our monthly active users are currently donating," he said.
Another failure has been the provision of cheaper support agreements for independent developers and small companies. James said that many had requested these plans, citing the high cost of enterprise support as a barrier, but in reality "our indie-focused tiers accounted for just 0.625 percent of our annual revenue." These plans will now be discontinued.
Avalonia UI was formerly a project of the .NET Foundation, which exists to support open source projects for .NET in non-financial ways. Earlier this year, Avalonia left .NET foundation, citing lack of any significant benefit from membership. Although it was aware that the .NET Foundation does not provide financial support for its projects, the team said that it had been "optimistic about receiving guidance and assistance in documentation, marketing strategies, and general advice on managing a popular open source project." Its experience, though, was a "notable lack of interaction and support from the Foundation," leading to its decision to leave.
Moving the project in a more commercial direction is not without risk. Microsoft is making renewed efforts to improve the official cross-platform framework, MAUI (Multi-platform App UI), and Uno Platform is also working on a visual designer. Avalonia UI is popular in part because of its energetic development, and in part because it is based on WPF, but developer enthusiasm may cool if its best tools and controls are not open source - though there is no intention to change the license for the core project.