Hi everyone - excited to announce Foxglove 2.0, with a new integrated UI (merging Foxglove Studio and Data Platform), new pricing plans, and open source changes.
Streamlined UI for smoother robotics observability Automatic data offload through Foxglove Agent Updated pricing plans to make Foxglove accessible for teams of all sizes Changes to our open-source strategy (we’re discontinuing the open source edition of Foxglove Studio)
Note that Foxglove is still free for academic teams and researchers! If you fall into that category, please contact us and we can upgrade your account.
Oh, so it is as I feared the business newspeak for “we’re closing the source code”. I understand the decision, but you could write it frankly and directly.
Fair point, we were more direct with the blog post heading - “Discontinuing Foxglove Studio open source”. I’ll try to avoid the business newspeak next time
While skepticism is always appropriate, I’ll restate that we remain fully committed to MCAP. It is a completely separate open source project, and I don’t see any world where a proprietary file format makes sense for the robotics community (plus, the format itself has been finalized over 2 years ago, so it is not dependent on Foxglove alone for future development).
Foxglove Studio is a different story. Visualization is an infinitely complex problem space, and over the past 3 years we’ve spent the majority of our engineering time and effort on it. We tried to make open source visualization work, and I’m probably more disappointed than anyone that we could not. Unfortunately, it is not possible to sustain full time development on Foxglove while continuing to give our main product away for free.
The 1.x source code remains available on GitHub, but our future development will be closed source. We still have a free plan for small teams (up to 3 users), and a free academic plan for teams of any size (with some extra free data storage as well). We hope that companies using Foxglove in a commercial setting will choose to support our ongoing development by signing up for a paid plan.
Studio has been a great improvement over webviz for robotics visualization and I’m sorry to see it be closed. It is a difficult problem. MCAP itself in a good state, as amacneil says, so I’m not worried should Foxglove’s “open-source strategy” change again.
Foxglove has been one of the companies that contributed to modernizing the ROS ecosystem. I hope this business decision will not affect all these efforts.
Still, keeping schemas, data formats, layout descriptions, and other declarative specifications open and standardized is essential for a healthy ecosystem. MCAP is perhaps the most important item (assuming support will continue) but what about these layout descriptions and their schemas:
Given your experience in data visualization and management, an open standardization project led by Foxglove on layout descriptions may be well-received, too.
I will continue using MCAP and advocating it in my projects.
I know that many people feel strongly about open source in this forum, and that’s ok.
But I respect the decision of Foxglove and, at the end of the day, I believe that what people need the most is good software that is free for personal and academic use (and maybe fairly priced for commercial use).
If you disagree, that is ok, no need to start a flamethrowers war on this forum (again).
I am a strong advocate of open source and it is what made the ROS community great, but closed/commercial software is OK and should exist as well, in a healthy ecosystem.
If I may give a suggestion, in the context Groot2, that is closed source too, I have purchased an escrow service with a third party, that guarantees that if my company becomes unable to support and make the software available, its source code will be release under an OS license.
If the company is ever acquired, this obligation will be transferred to the new company.
@amacneil where can I find details on the “integrated UI”? The blog post is very light on specifics.
My main concern is that the desktop app is being done away with in favor of a browser. My team routinely has to operate without internet connection while looking at local data so the loss of the desktop app would just make us stick with the open source 1.x version or swap back to rviz. Related, would login be required to visualize local mcap files then? That poses a similar challenge to above.
Note: We already pay for foxglove data platform, so I’m mainly concerned about usability here.
Desktop app is not going away, and offline support is not going away. It now has data browsing built in (that will only work when online), but local files and websockets will still work fine offline. The desktop app does prompt for sign in the first time you open it, but after that you can be offline.
Integrated UI simply means that the old “data platform” UI and “studio” UI are now one application. Previously console.foxglove.dev and studio.foxglove.dev were totally separate apps, now they are combined and live at app.foxglove.dev. In the future we will now be able to show much more context in the visualization view when you’re looking at cloud data.
This situation is pretty different from Qt. Qt is a software library, where a GPL license essentially requires the library user to release their software under a GPL-compatible license.
It is also unclear how well this works for the Qt Company, based on the changes that were implemented a while ago (e.g. they are no longer releasing LTS versions as open-source.)
The Foxglove app is mainly used by end users, who in most cases are not redistributing it (or have no problem redistributing it under GPL / AGPL), so this license change would not solve the original problem: the financing of future development.
Financing the development of open-source software is a hard problem as evidenced by this announcement.
You are in a really big situation, where you develop your software open-source. It would mean that every contributor that’s not part of your company would also have a right to say something with the open-source software. Like at this point it is hard to make it close-source.
Streamlined UI for smoother robotics observability
Automatic data offload through Foxglove Agent
Updated pricing plans to make Foxglove accessible for teams of all sizes
Changes to our open-source strategy (we’re discontinuing the open source edition of Foxglove Studio)