Elementary Will Soon Be Open Source
Last year was a really exciting year for Elementary: we saw the announcement of Elementary v1.0, the Discord community grow to over 650 members, awesome community projects spring up like @bgins’ Coincident Spectra and @vewilya’s Pluviat Delay, and uptake from some really exciting companies and teams like Arpeggi.
The end of last year was also a great opportunity for reflection, and for me to clarify my goals with this project. Much of my work in 2022 included efforts to find a sustainable strategy for funding Elementary’s continued development while still enabling new users to pick up the project and evaluate it before committing to any fees. That’s what prompted removing any fee structure around using the library itself, while pairing it with an attempt at building a marketplace for selling paid add-ons.
After reflecting on this past year, my conclusion is that these attempts have also built a sense of hesitation for new users and larger companies– to name two prominent factors: an unfamiliar proprietary license, and no visibility into the core framework to aid in evaluating whether it’s the right fit for certain projects. These hesitations are totally valid, and ultimately they stand in contrast to one of my guiding theses that removing barriers to entry for those users will be a key factor in Elementary’s success.