elide at 1.0

[Sam Gammon (sgammon)]

Elide is at 1.0 🥳

After 4.5 years of development and thousands of PRs, Elide is ready for use at 1.0! We’ve made some structural changes to the project and are sharing them here to kick off a discussion.
Elide is going closed-source (kinda).

We’re transitioning to a paid model, and we want to keep some of our tech under private distribution for now. That doesn’t mean Elide can’t return to its OSS roots later, and, in fact, we do have plans to do that someday. Those plans are indeterminate for now.

Elide is moving to a closed-first license, with source available to anyone who wants to contribute. We’re also introducing a new license model that integrates with this decision. Read on to learn more.

Why?
We’ve seen several innovative runtimes either sour into rotted fruit or end up serving just one large user’s interests. We don’t want that to be the outcome for this project.

Note

Current Contributors:
If you’ve contributed to Elide on the way to 1.0, you get a free license and can request access to our upcoming Source-Available access. Just drop by the Discord and ask. While 1.0 is a full rewrite, we couldn’t have made it here alone, and we won’t be charging the people who helped us along the way.

Elide is introducing a paid (but fair) licensing structure.

There is a new paid Pro version at $15, one-time; it’s not a subscription, and the copy you buy will continue to work even if you don’t pay for our next major release. Elide Pro is our Individual subscription level. Anyone can buy this, including organizations, up to $1m/year in revenue.

There is another new Enterprise version, priced at $199/month; it will come with many more features, all genuinely geared toward enterprise.

That is, we won’t ever gate major features based on your licensing: everything just works in the binary we give you, and it’s the same binary we give everyone else. But enterprises face challenges distinct from those of regular developers, and our plan for them will address them.

Future posts will outline our new Pro and Enterprise upgrades in detail.

Elide is introducing an EAP program.

We are also introducing an “EAP program,” similar to one of JetBrains’ distribution options for IntelliJ Ultimate; the rules of the EAP program are as follows:

• You must always be on the latest copy (with a 30-day grace period)
• You must keep telemetry enabled (so we can gather error reports)
• You can’t qualify for Enterprise licensing and use EAP at the same time.

I like this pattern a lot because it makes Elide free for exactly the people who need it most and are typically happy to agree to all those terms. It also covers many use cases where licensing doesn’t make sense anyway, like CI/CD and ephemeral container use cases, where keeping track of and attaching a valid license is a blocking annoyance.

To use the EAP, just install Elide. It’s the default behavior for our nightly channel. Once you upgrade, you can switch to stable or any channel that suits you.

What this means

(1) Elide is a fundable business and is not going anywhere.
(2) Elide can provide great user support and can turn around fixes faster for paid customers. Pro users get priority and 1:1 support in Discord or their own repositories.
(3) If we can create a genuinely great product, which people genuinely want, then we can stick around and keep doing that.
Stability is important for a runtime. Not just in the technical sense, either: it has to stick around long into the future, so it can keep supporting your dreams.

Using it

Elide now supports Windows and even macOS Intel. We have containers, GitHub Action support, and so much more. Find installation and usage instructions at:

Elide’s website
Elide’s docs
On Discord
On GitHub