Uno Platform, Open-Source and Free
Developers often ask us about Uno Platform sustainability. We’ll follow Scott Hanselman’s motto of ‘not wasting keystrokes’ and are documenting our sustainability model here so it is easily referenceable.
Longevity is a great, positive, signal of a project’s long-term sustainability. We believe our 7-year track record and sustainability business plan explained below helps you understand why Uno Platform will be around for a long time.
About Uno Platform
For those new to Uno Platform – it allows for creation of pixel-perfect, single-source C# and XAML apps which run natively on Windows, iOS, Android, macOS, Linux and Web via WebAssembly. Uno Platform is free and Open Source (Apache 2.0) and available on GitHub.
Why Open Source Uno Platform?
Answering this question is essential in answering the sustainability question. It explains why we get up every morning and enthusiastically work on Uno.
As software engineers we are appalled by the amount of waste that happens in our industry. The same UI components keep on being rewritten. With our architectural approach to multi-platform development, we believe we can efficiently leverage decades of investment Microsoft has put into Windows and Visual Studio and eliminate that waste.
Uno Platform was born in 2013 from our need for productivity and creating pixel-perfect consumer grade applications for our clients. At that time such tooling didn’t exist, so we rolled up our sleeves and developed one – hello Uno Platform!
While we could do most of Uno development alone, having more developers contribute to its success evolves the project faster, which benefits everyone. Hence why we have used a very permissive Apache 2.0 license to open source Uno Platform. Which brings us to sustainability of the project.
Sustainability: The Business Model – The Enterprise Support Agreement
Sustainability of Uno Platform is ensured via a “Red Hat-like” support model.
For organizations that want a deeper level of support beyond our community support on StackOverflow and Discord, we offer several options for prioritizing support – be it developing new features or looking at open issues. Essentially having an enterprise agreement with Uno team allows one to ‘jump the support queue’.
We have various support agreements in place to be able to address needs of all organization and team sizes.
Professional Support agreement becomes a shared responsibility for your project success. Our engineering team collaborates with customers to ensure the success of your projects and address your Uno Platform-related GitHub issues faster.
One of the primary support customers for Uno Platform is our parent company – nventive. nventive is a 13-year-old, 200-person strong custom application development consultancy with offices in Montreal and Quebec City in Canada. Its customers include the likes of Air Canada, VCA, National Geographic Learning and others.
Sustainability: Direct Contributors – coding, documentation, issue filing
The more developers use Uno Platform in production, the faster we catch any bugs which are fixed either by developers who discovered them, Uno community or Uno core team.
We are fortunate to have over 180 contributors who helped fix over 1300 issues together with our core team, resulting in 15 releases since May 2018.
The enthusiasm and power of open source community is a big factor in sustaining Uno Platform.
Sustainability: Optional Plugins
[Edit: February 2024] In addition to the aforementioned sustainability model via enterprise support, which has been in place since 2021, as of February 2024, we have introduced a new, optional Figma plugin which further contributes to our sustainability. You can learn more about our Figma plugin and paid model here.
In Conclusion
The enterprise paying customers and community contributions are the lifeline of Uno Platform. As its maintainers our job becomes balancing the community and paying customer support needs. A healthy balance is needed, and we believe we have accomplished it, but we continue to tune it.
This business and sustainability model have successfully led us from supporting iOS, Android and WebAssembly a just few years ago, to also supporting macOS and Linux and Skia today.
Most importantly everyone benefits from a more robust, free, and open-source platform.
If you have any more questions regarding Uno Platform please reach out to our team, or give Uno Platform a try via this 2-minute step by step tutorial.
Sasha Krsmanovic, CMO, Uno Platform
