Hi again,
Have you already in mind how type of licence you will create for Edgeline ?
And wich price it will be ?
Thanks
Some early information in this post (I’m sure this is subject to change):
Hi,
We are still evaluating various business models. Probably we will go for the Free/Standard/Premium options and still considering a royalty fee in some form for really large projects.
I’d love to hear what models would work the best for you. Nothing decided yet, and we are very open to ideas. So go ahead, and please, let us know what’s your opinion! 
All my projects are released as open source with a license (typically CC0) that allows commercial use and does not require release of derived source code. For this reason, I stay with free tools and libraries that are compatible with this model.
If EdgeLine will have that option it would be great. If not, LVGL alone is also very useful.
BTW, since EdgeLine is a tool, there are two license aspects involved, for the tool itself and for the code it generates.
Hope it helps.
3 Likes
I have no problem to pay for good tool, but it would be good if the code which the tool generates will have different licence and can be used without tool.
1 Like
So ask money for EdgeLine and its features, but once you paid you can make whatever you want with the code?
@kisvegabor, my general approach for my open source project is to avoid per fee tools so other can work on them as well. For the case here, if the generated code looks ‘native’ and manually extensible enough such that the tool can be dropped after initial use it may work.
Maybe add a per-fee ‘pro’ version that supports additional features?
Business model is a tricky thing. 
@kisvegabor I agree with @zapta. It would be great if you can export code from EdgeLine and edit it manualy. This would ensure that anyone can colaborate on it and do not have to pay for editor (whatever reasone they have). I would think of something like, if I paid for editor, I can open/import project, but free version of editor would not support that feature so you can export and share your project and those who are willing to pay for editor will have their work easier as they do not have to code it.
I hope that make sense to you.
2 Likes
Manually editing the generated code is possible, but if you generate the project again, the changes will be overwritten. So theoretically you can share the code, others can edit it, but you can’t add new features in the editor to the edited code.
Just to add another opinion: the most ideal model for me would be to pay up front with no royalties; I often work on big and small projects for different people, and keeping track of royalties sounds like a nightmare. I am starting to learn LVGL and would definitely pay for an MCU-independent GUI editor (perhaps a few hundred dollars depending on what features were available).
Licensing of the code output sounds tricky though, I guess ideally the code itself it would be considered public domain (or close to) so that it can be used in open source projects. It would be kind of strange if the output code was more restrictively licensed than LVGL itself.
2 Likes
I think this is a key issue. I’ve been using lvgl since v6, contributing on a small scale to the code base reporting issues, beta testing, promoting lvgl and maintaining an open-source project based on lvgl.
Now, if Edgeline prevents me from using any of generated code in opensource projects, it would seem odd. Because on one side, you can contribute to the MIT licensed lvgl code base but not use Edgeline because it is a licensed tool that generated the source code you want to compile.
I understand the need to generate revenue, but please take the small and open-source developers and lvgl contributors into account when settling on a license model.
4 Likes
LOL this sounds like all word documents I ever wrote in Microsoft Word would belong to Microsoft.
Hope you’re all kidding.
It’s true that adding any restrictive license to the generated code doesn’t make much sense.