After a decade of maintaining open-source tooling for Avalonia, including our IDE extensions and developer tools, we are evolving our approach to better serve our community whilst protecting valuable intellectual property. This change represents a strategic shift that will enable us to deliver enhanced functionality to all Avalonia developers.
Since Avalonia's inception in 2013, we have maintained our tooling under the same permissive MIT license as our core framework. This approach, whilst aligned with our open-source principles, has proven unique within the .NET ecosystem, where development tooling typically operates under proprietary licenses. Our experience has demonstrated that whilst this open-source approach provided transparency, it has not yielded any meaningful community engagement.
Through the development of Avalonia Accelerate, we have made significant improvements to our foundational tooling infrastructure, including substantial enhancements to our XAML parser and previewer technology. These improvements represent valuable intellectual property that could benefit our entire developer community.
To leverage these advancements effectively, we are transitioning specific components of our tooling suite to a closed-source model. This change will initially affect our Visual Studio 2022 extension, with potential future expansion to our Visual Studio Code extension. Importantly, we will continue to maintain the existing open-source previewer infrastructure for the JetBrains Rider extension.
As we continue to innovate and develop new tooling, our default position is to include these within the Avalonia Accelerate offering. This approach ensures we can invest appropriately in creating high-quality developer tools while protecting our intellectual property investments.
This strategic shift enables us to incorporate proprietary Avalonia Accelerate technology into our free developer tools, significantly improving the development experience for all Avalonia users. By aligning with industry standards in the .NET ecosystem, we can more effectively:
Whilst this represents a departure from our historical approach, we believe this change will ultimately deliver greater value to our community through enhanced tooling capabilities, whilst ensuring sustainable ongoing development and maintenance.