Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel, recently announced that his latest creation, “Spark”, will be closed source and a commercial product.
Now is probably as good a time as ever to announce that Spark will not be free. Spent 8 months working on it.
— Taylor Otwell (@taylorotwell) March 3, 2016
It’s hard to believe it’s been 8 months since the last Spark was teased, but it seems the new one will be completely different and rewritten from scratch:
Spark has taken a while to release because I literally started from a blank Sublime Text screen and re-wrote.
— Taylor Otwell (@taylorotwell) March 4, 2016
If you’re interested in one of the old forks of the original, here is one - feel free to use it for absolutely anything:
@marcelpociot @andy_huggins @PhillippOh yes anyone can do whatever they want with the old "Spark". change it, sell it, modify it, etc
— Taylor Otwell (@taylorotwell) March 4, 2016
Now, there are two schools of thought here - one, to which I also belong, shrugged their shoulders and said “good for him - earning money from his hard work”. The other, however, holds a much more pessimistic world view. To quote a Reddit comment:
Whether it was re-written or not, and legalities aside, this is the
kind of announcement that makes me a little bit concerned about the
future of Laravel.Taylor’s obviously completely entitled to release a paid-for product,
legally and ethically, and has put a great deal of work into a
wonderful product with Laravel, and I’m assuming Spark too.The problem is the way things like this seem to come out of the blue
to many Laravel users. From the tweet that “now is probably a good
time”, well… to me, and others, I suspect that the “good time” for
this announcement would have been 8 months ago. Personally, I have
every confidence that Laravel Spark will be a great product, and
likely well worth the money. I don’t think I’ll be using it though,
because I’m not sure I trust it not to change or become more expensive
once I’m hooked in.At this point I’d also be much more comfortable using a
community-maintained fork of Laravel than Laravel itself, because I do
have concerns that it will switch its licensing or paid-for status or
whatever else at the drop of a hat.
This, to me, is an odd standpoint - and judging by the Reddit thread and some Twitter responses, it’s not an uncommon one.
First of all, the original was licensed as MIT which, in license terms, essentially means “do what ever you want with this code but namedrop the author”. So even if Taylor hadn’t rewritten the app from scratch, it would have been perfectly okay to do this. But he claims to have rewritten it, thus not “misusing” the work others have put in via the previous version (a moot point anyway due to the MIT license as mentioned above). Secondly, like he himself says it in the tweets, it’s just not justifiable to offer something that took so much effort for free, when the app is geared towards nothing less than exclusively making its users money.
Last but not least, the price is said to be under $100. Not only that, but it will also be a perpetual license - a one-time cost for the current major version, plus bug fixes. Granted, Laravel hasn’t exactly had a peachy history with versioning so far, so those major version bumps might be happening sooner than expected, but this is still a hell of a deal - bootstrapping a SaaS app alone would cost a team much, much more in man hours than $100.
We’ll be taking a look at what Laravel Spark (the OS one) wanted to be in an upcoming post, but for now, why not let us know where you stand in this #sparkgate? Are you shocked and appalled by the announcement, or nodding your head in agreement, eagerly awaiting the software’s release so you can explore it? Maybe both?