Closed source add-ons

Questions
1

The core CMS is open source, but all key paid for add-ons are closed source. It would be very useful if these were open source too.

For example, I was trying to figure out why there’s a UI/UX bug in the Umbraco Forms’ form builder, and potentially contribute a fix for it.

The add-ons could still be paid for, and require a license. Other companies do this, right? This would align more with Umbraco’s open source position too?

I assume there’s a concern over people abusing it by avoiding licenses, and unofficial forking?

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2

… or people with a license can be granted access to the source. Semi-open-source?

I’ve had to open things up and explore behind them a time or two myself.

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3

In the newer versions (V15+) we only get the minified javascript files…

When trying to make editors or extending it further it would be great to see how HQ have done this

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4

Yeah I like that idea actually!

I’ve seen this before on private GitHub repositories actually, where you’d paid for a license fee and you were automatically assigned access to the repositories.

5

I was always told with Umbraco that the code is the main docs… That can’t be the case for forms and others :sweat_smile: if we can’t see it

6

I have seen this too… I know CreativeTim do this with their templates, you get read-only access to the repos

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7

Access could also be offered as a perk of being an Umbraco Partner (maybe a certain level, e.g. Gold?)

Surely if you’re an Umbraco Gold Partner, you’re trustworthy of having read-only access?

8

Wasn’t the case last year, but tbh I’ve never asked and I should have.

9

A snapshot of the Workflow 14/15 client is public, but admittedly hasn’t been updated in a while:

In principle, I agree; it wouldn’t hurt much to make the source code public. It’s been brought up a number of times over the years. In general, it takes a lot of time and effort to “police” an open-source repository, as you would have to answer to questions not only related to the product but now also the source code at hand. You would have to take a stance on whether to accept forks and contributions, and so on.

I guess you could say that the quality of an open-source repository generally would be held to a much higher standard than closed ones both by maintainers and developers/users.

Umbraco has a lot of products and each product has at least one repository, so you could imagine the time and effort to maintain it all is a monumental task.

Happy to bring it up with the team to see if it could make sense to publicize even more products :umbraco-heart:

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10

Please do raise with the team Jacob - would be great to see some movement here! :high-5-you-rock:

Just imagine… at the 20th anniversary Codegarden, Umbraco marks the milestone by doubling down on open source, committing to making all paid add-ons fully open source. Now that would be a great announcement! One can dream… :thinking::grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

11

Otherwise, if it’s for investigating how something is done, at least with Umbraco Engage, I’ve had quite the time with DotPeek, which is a free .net decompiler.

The source code is not obfuscated and quite readable.

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