Our relationship with open source software (OSS) stems from over a decade of experience building and maintaining one of the .NET ecosystem's leading UI frameworks. Our approach balances pragmatic business needs with a genuine commitment to the open source community that has helped shape our success.
The foundation of our business, the Avalonia UI framework itself, represents our commitment to open source. Avalonia will always remain open source. The priority is maintaining the trust we've built with our community over many years. We understand that adopting a dual-license for core framework might be financially appealing in the short term, but it would fundamentally undermine the trust and goodwill we've cultivated. Such changes would ultimately prove catastrophic to our business and the ecosystem we've carefully nurtured. All our thinking should be long-term and a license change would only serve us in the short-term.
When evaluating whether new components should be open source or proprietary, we consider several crucial factors:
When evaluating potential features or components, we carefully consider both the upfront development costs and the long-term strategic implications. Our decision-making process distinguishes between "painkillers", essential features that solve critical problems—and "vitamins", nice-to-have enhancements that, whilst valuable, aren't fundamentally required to build with Avalonia.
The development of Hot Reload capabilities serves as a good example of this. Whilst the community often points to its availability in other frameworks, implementing this feature will require approximately a year of senior developers time, a significant investment that must be weighed against other strategic priorities. While we'd love to ship Hot Reload as part of the OSS, it's complexity and being a "vitamin" rather than a "painkiller" makes this impossible.
We deliberately avoid the trap of allowing our product strategy to be dictated by what competitors offer for free. Such an approach would trigger a race to the bottom, effectively ceding control of our business model to external factors. Instead, we maintain autonomy over our development priorities and pricing strategy, ensuring we can sustain meaningful investment in both essential features and strategic enhancements.
We evaluate how each component fits into the broader Avalonia ecosystem. Components that enhance the core framework's functionality often benefit from being open source, fostering community engagement and contributions. However, specialised tooling or complex controls may better serve the community through a proprietary model that ensures sustainable development and maintenance.
Our ability to continue investing in Avalonia's development depends on maintaining a healthy business. Through Avalonia Accelerate (our upcoming proprietary offering), we're creating a model that allows us to fund the development of advanced components and tools while leaving the door open to potential future transitions to freemium or open source models.
From 2025, our development tools will transition to a closed-source model. This decision reflects our experience as the only UI framework in the .NET ecosystem maintaining open source IDE tooling. While these tools will remain free for users, the proprietary model enables two crucial strategic objectives.
Firstly, it ensures we can sustain development without compromising our ability to compete effectively. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it allows us to leverage our proprietary intellectual property across our entire ecosystem. For instance, our next-generation XAML parser, developed for our upcoming designer, represents significant intellectual property that we intend to incorporate into our IDE extensions. Under an open-source model, we would be unable to integrate such proprietary improvements without exposing valuable IP, a situation that would effectively prevent us from bringing these enhancements to our community.
This approach aligns with established norms in the .NET ecosystem, where development tools often incorporate proprietary components to deliver enhanced functionality. We see this with .NET MAUI, Uno Platform and OpenSilver all keeping their tooling as proprietary. By adopting this norm, we can more effectively share innovations across our tooling suite, ultimately delivering a better experience for all users whilst protecting our intellectual property.
Our approach to UI controls is a balance. While we prefer to incorporate new controls into our open source core, we recognise that complex components with significant development and maintenance costs may initially need to be part of our Avalonia Accelerate offering. This approach ensures sustainable development and maintenance while providing professional support and documentation.
Our experience with the TreeDataGrid control illustrates the complexities of these decisions. Initially intended as a proprietary component, we released it as open source following a modest sponsorship arrangement. Despite its widespread adoption and popularity, this decision created an unsustainable situation where a complex control requiring specialist knowledge for maintenance generates significant work without corresponding revenue to support its development. This has led to reduced investment in the control's advancement, ultimately disappointing both our team and the community.
This experience has shaped our current thinking about complex controls. When a component requires substantial specialist knowledge and ongoing maintenance, making it open source without a sustainable funding model can paradoxically result in worse outcomes for all stakeholders. The inability to properly resource its development and maintenance can lead to stagnation, even as its popularity and usage grow.
We value our community's diverse perspectives whilst maintaining a clear vision for Avalonia's future. Our decade-plus commitment to open source has delivered substantial value to the .NET ecosystem. We remain dedicated to maintaining and enhancing our open source core while developing sustainable business models for new components.
The introduction of proprietary elements alongside our open source foundation represents a pragmatic approach to ensuring Avalonia's long-term success. This strategy allows us to continue investing in both open source and commercial components, serving our entire community's needs while maintaining the business's sustainability.