Why are more and more low-code tools going open source

Coffee Lounge
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Recently a lot of commercial low-code tools are going open source.

Just recently a powerful low-code tool called Toddle announced that they are going to open sourcing their product by end of 2024.

Here is an article from the CEO of Toddle.

Why are they going open source after being commercial for more than a decade in some cases (like for example Noodl)?

I read this article of Supabase and found it to be interesting and worth a read to understand why they chose to be open source from the very beginning.

It would be interesting to know the views of other community members.

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I believe one of the main reasons is AI progress.

Who is going to pay for a web builder when you can easily ask a current LLM to build it for you? Not to mention what will happen when Agentic AI arrives and software development becomes somehow autonomous.

By open sourcing you can regroup, continue developing as a community effort, take advantage of collective intelligence, and try to figure out what to do next.

The new nocode is asking a bot to build it for you. Open sourcing is probably a last effort to try and stay ahead of the curve for as long as possible. There are way too many commercial nocode tools out there. Soon enough there will be a lot of open source nocode tools. Then…singularity? :robot:

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Yes, I remember the first few that went open source:

and

The end result :funeral_urn:

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BTW, just as an update. Noodl open source result is a trainwreck. If you want a good example as how not to go open source there you have one.

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wait im just looking at noodl now, did it just die? like they open sourced it because they basically closed down?
Cant buy hosting through them, and no updates at all on the code base?

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That’s my guess.

Apparently there’s a maintained open source fork.

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hahah their home page doesn't fill me with any confidence, and codebase seen very little changes, only 2k lines of code looks like since open source.

I legit thought noodl had a good business, like i thought they were fairly popular

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Contrary to that Plasmic & Web Studio are doing well in spite of being open sourced.

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Not really. Noodl developers could not earn from the product so they took the prudent decision to open source it.

I observed one peculiar thing in case of Noodl and that is that it did not grow as per the needs of developers. For example after being in business for almost 20 years it still does not have mature set of basic components/controls which we expect in any web app developer tool.

Darn, for every small thing one has to build a custom component!

Even today the community is not doing anything to add support for standard ready to use components.

Imagine wasting hours building (or updating an existing) component like date picker to just show date in any format other then what is supplied.

The same goes for Table component.

The reason most of Noodl users present for such shot comings is that it is so flexible that it only provides bare minimum and you as a developer has freedom to enhance it as you like.

Oppose to Noodl I was presently surprised when Plasmic listened to its users and added support for ready to use components from Ant Design.

If you go to Noodl community on Discord you will see that the community keeps on bragging about Graph Node based web page designer and it flexibilities.

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I don't think they are adding much in way of features.

The most glaring short coming is the so call back end which is based on Parse(platform) which is still using MongoDB 4.x.

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