As you might have hear that we have ended our collaboration with SquareLine Studio and now we are thinking about our LVGL UI editor.
We already have a solid vision about the technical part and features (I’ll share these soon) but I’m still not sure about the business model.
This is how I see it now:
Free: Great for the community and the users at first look, but the bad commercial model is unhealthy for the project too. With a free project it’s hard to hire full time employees and keep the maintainers motivated.
Open source: It’s great for fast bug fixing, fast spreading, etc, but hard from the commercial point of view.
I learn these from LVGL itself. It evolves so fast, and attracts a lot of people but it’s hard to make it sustainable. So I have these options in mind:
Open source with dual license: GPL + commercial
Closed source but free for public projects
I’m very very curious about your ideas and comments on this topic.
what you need to look at is how much you would make from the commercial licenses. Is that money going to be enough to pay for developers to develop at the same speed as an opensource project would get developed at? Remember open source = not paying for developers. so commercial sales of the software would be money in the pocket. You can offer bounties to get “free” developers more motivated but it has to be a sum of money that aligns with the amount of work involved. Just as in trade jobs like welding there is a HUGE difference in the quality of the work when you pay a person 15.00 an hour VS 35.00 an hour for a person that is more seasoned.
The local government where I live (county) has set aside 2 million dollars USD for new software to handle property value assessments. I made the suggestion to them to put together a list of what you want the software to do and put up a million dollar bounty for it. Then they would own the code and they would be able to make any changes they wanted. They would have to pay a person or 2 for a year or so to handle fixing any bugs they might come across and after that they could pay for updates to the code from the person that originally developed it when they want something changed or they could keep a single person on staff that would be responsible to making changes. It would cost them far less money to do that. There is no money paid unless the requirements are met and they get what they want. There would be a crap load of people that would write the software so there would be a plethora of competition which will mean the quality will be really high. IDK if they have considered my idea or not but it is a good one that’s for sure.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on LVGL editor business model. It’s crucial to strike a balance between community support and sustainability. Considering LVGL rapid evolution, a dual license approach could check both project viability and community engagement. This model allows for commercial use while still maintaining an open-source foundation. Looking forward to seeing how LVGL editor evolves.
When I look back, licensing for SLS was not so bad with free or monthly subscription. I mostly used free one for prototyping, but I would buy SMB licence to finish and export project from it. I do not know what your plans are for “new” GUI editor, but it maybe would be suitable to go with same path as Ondsel did go. Develop for paying customers and bring that back to the FOSS. I guess that you would find many companies which would be willing to pay for custom design. You can maybe have some board here in the forum, where you can offer paid work for these customers.
Those are my ideas and I hope you will make even better SW than SLS was, but this time will be FOSS so anybody can contribute same way to it as to the LVGL.
Quick update:
There is a silence on our side not because nothing is happening but the opposite. So many things are happening (especially from business POV) that it would be too early to say anything.
I would like to emphasis the 2 boundaries that we set for ourselves:
LVGL needs to remain free, open-source (MIT) and platform independent: no matter what LVGL needs to have the same model as it has now.
We need to have a platform independent editor which is free at least for open source projects. (Can be closed-sourced and can be paid for commercial)
As I’ve spent my last 10 years with you, the community of LVGL, I would like to assure you that I won’t let you down, and come up with a solution which will strengthen LVGL even more.
You can start closed source and move to OSS later if it makes sense. It is very difficult to go the other direction.
I would try to avoid changing licenses all the time and making things overly complex, like the Qt project does.
Having reasonable price points and being open and transparent about them is important. Qt seems to have very high overhead and has boxed itself into enterprise customers – us small guys don’t even bother checking any more. As a result, I’ve moved most of my Embedded Linux project UIs to web technologies, which has been a good thing in the end.
Would you consider other ways to increase financial healthiness? you can perhaps put certain contents behind a paywall. Perhaps sell example scripts, books, tutorials, etc.
Another thought is paid official support from your team. I am very sure many people would love to pay a decent amount to have someone from your team to take a look at their project for solutions.
I’m new to the embedded world but have been following the evolution of lvgl for some time now - pretty amazing how fast things grew! I like the commitment of the creators to keep it MIT - FOSS but understand the need for a sustainable financing plan.
It might help to draw a comparison to blender, which is basically an editor and also FOSS and still offers plenty of possibility to make money: it’s perfectly normal on blender forums to hire people for specific jobs for good money. And since the IOT world will always produce new devices, each of which needing it’s own sofware implementation in a way generative chatbots are still limited, I think lvlg specialists should not be worried too much about their future… Even now I guess most of your funding comes from partnership with private companies needing a quick way to set up their products - just like linux, those partnerships are where the big bucks are.
Thank you for joining the discussion and sorry for my late reply.
By now we see clearer on the topic of business model. With the paid versions we will target big companies so they will be more expensive, but supporting the open source projects is definitely on our radar.
Your approach makes a lot of sense. It’s essentially about weighing upfront costs versus long-term flexibility and sustainability. Open source development, when incentivized properly (e.g., through bounties), can indeed attract skilled contributors who care about quality — sometimes even more so than traditional contract developers. Ownership of the final product also gives more control and reduces vendor lock-in, which is a major advantage for institutions like local governments. I think more public entities should explore this model — especially when transparency and adaptability are key.
That would be the point to doing it. The issue with buying something that is already made is the “maintenance” fees attached to buying that software. The hundreds of thousands of dollars that gets spent every year in support fees is completely off the wall. The business model of those companies is not to develop a complete bug free piece of software but instead to make software that has design issues built into it so they can sell the subscriptions for support. That is where their revenue stream is. There is no motivation to fix any bugs in the program because after all those bugs are what keep the support revenue flowing in. It’s a shady crooked business model that has been used for the last 30 years and that kind of business model needs to go away.
What do you think Microsoft makes more money on, selling Windows 11 or the revenue that is made from selling support for it? They make the most from all of the personal data they collect and resell but that’s a completely different issue all together.
There is no motivation to write quality software. There hasn’t been for a long long time and that is because of that crappy business model.
I will say this. If I owned a software company the single biggest requirement in order to get a job as a programmer would be to give the possible new employee an ESP32, or an STM32 and given a project to complete that can only be done if quality code is written. They have to get the software to work without any bugs or problems and it has to fit within the resources of the MCU. If they are unable or unwilling to do it (paid to do it) they would not be hired. There are far too many sloppy developers out there that just don’t care because the mentality is if there isn’t enough resources on the system the software is running on then the user needs to upgrade their system. So efficient code seems to have been pushed to the side. Code I write I always benchmark and check memory use and make tweaks to it to see if I can get it to run faster and to use less memory.
People that contribute to open source projects actually tend to write cleaner code and more efficient code. Reason why? Because most times it is right there where anyone and everyone is able to see it and critique it and also make suggestion on how to improve it. The only exception to that seems to be web browsers because almost all of them have memory leaks. I think the memory leak issue is more of an upstream issue with JavaScript.
There has been some really shady companies come up in the last 10 years that are flying under the Open Source umbrella but you cannot every get a copy of the source code. Not even if you buy into their support. You cannot download a copy of the compiled software either unless you pay for their support which then you get a username and password to the website where the software is located so you can download it. But it is marketed as Open Source. IDK how it is legal for them to do that but they do it.
