Devlog 3

Well, it's been a while.

This devlog will be shorter as I just want to announce that WriterSharp will no longer be using Avalonia.

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Context

By the end of this month, Avalonia will retire its Avalonia Accelerate Community license, which was a way for them to offer OSS first individuals and small organizations free access to some of their preemium tools, such as Parcel, their app packaging solution, amongst others.

Well, it's sad to see that they now consider their Visual Studio plugin a "preemium" tool, only offering it for free for OSS individuals. The problem is that I also happen to be the co-founder of an OSS first organization, a very small one, called OceanApocalypseStudios and I lost my Community license for said organization, due to their licensing changes.

Licensing for Individuals

I could, in theory, make no changes to WriterSharp — Avalonia still allows individuals to have a Community license if elligible, but I'm not going to support such a greedy licensing change.

I obviously understand developing and maintaining open-source software is hard: I'm an open-source developer too. But if they think the solution to the problem is making a small OSS organization that currently makes no profit and only has 2 people working on it pay 24€ monthly (cheapest non-free plan, by the way) for an Avalonia license, then they're awfully wrong.

Uno Platform

Taking advantage of the fact WriterSharp is still very early in development, I'll be officially moving to Uno Platform: an open-source cross-platform UI framework that is fully free (except for their Studio app, but even that is only paid if you want the AI features, which I gladly pass on).

Uno has also been around for quite some time, and seems like the logical alternative to Avalonia.

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Like I said, this was a short devlog. I just needed to tell y'all what was going on with this change, which will take place somewhere in the near future.