Quiet UI is Now Open Source

About a month ago, I released Quiet UI under a source-available license. The idea was to make it free for personal, educational, and non-profit use while requiring payment for commercial licenses.

I knew this would be difficult to police, but I hoped that folks would mostly do the right thing. I wasn't concerned about people “stealing” it, since those folks wouldn't have bought a license anyways. Call it e-shrinkage.

And while Quiet is my creative outlet — a side project I work on for fun, believe it or not — it would have been nice to earn some money from it. After all, companies pay literally millions of dollars in FTE salaries to create their own component libraries. Surely a $199 price tag would be a bargain, especially considering the many glowing reviews:

Quite UI is probably the cleanest component library I've come across.
— Wayne R

This is incredible work
— lazerbones

It's so beautifully crafted.
— rancar2

I have been incredibly impressed by the level of polish and attention to detail in everything from the accessibility considerations to the API design and theming options. I cannot imagine how much work and time this must have taken
— allmarkedup

I'm seriously considering making this the default component set for all side projects going forward.
— Dave Rupert

Turns out, Quiet was a bargain. At least for the three people who actually paid for it.

Ending the Experiment #

I knew the experiment might turn out this way, but I'd be remiss to say I'm not disappointed by the culture of shunning software that isn't open source.

The source-available license Quiet was initially released under is actually more permissive than most copyleft licenses. Take the GPL, for example. You can't legally use GPL code in a personal project without making the entire project available under the same license. Somehow this is kosher, but a non-commercial license that lets people use the software for literally anything other than making money is evil.

Fortunately, getting my work into the world is what's really important to me. And I think having more options, particularly for Web Components, will promote adoption and show the world that interoperable UI components are more pragmatic than framework components. The latter neither work outside of their ecosystem nor live on after their framework has churned.

Why the fuck should your UI library die with your framework?

Shifting Focus #

Going forward, I will continue to maintain my existing open source projects. I may even open source smaller utilities. But I'm not really interested in pursuing any more serious open source endeavors at this point. It's all take and no give. And I've already given more than enough for two lifetimes.

To the three people who purchased a commercial license: thank you for your support! Full refunds have already been processed for each of you. I hope whatever you build turns out amazing!

For those who appreciate the years of work that went into building Quiet UI, I've established the Quiet Insiders program. You can pay what you want to be in the club, which gets you into the private Discord server where I'm more than happy to help the people who actually support my work.

For everyone else, enjoy Quiet UI under its freshly minted MIT license. But take note: I'm managing the project the way I want to manage it. Quiet remains my creative outlet, and I'm neither obligated nor interested in building an open source community around it.

Sorry, but I'm not solving everyone's problems for free anymore.