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Hi. @Romulus - sorry for the slow reply here and thanks for your question - it has been a busy time.
As has been promised, NEO will be released as an open source package and made available for Premium users, although this will only happen when the package is satisfactorily stable. It should be understood that NEO will offered as a stock, opinionated solution that will require customisation for many users. Publishing of native apps is a time consuming process that many users will need support to complete. I understand that you have technical skills but users without such proficiency will no doubt require support - there will be opportunities for proficient devs within the UNA community to provide those customisation and support services as well.
What we are offering right now as a paid service is a fully supported service supporting users to customise NEO to their requirements and publish native apps. What you get is a hands on service from the UNA to customise the NEO app to your specific requirements, connect to existing UNA instances if required and publish native apps. Given that native app development of any complexity usually costs between $80-250k - the $40k price tag offers an extremely reasonable rate.
UNA team (working with some enterprise clients) have spent many 1000s of hours in developing NEO, a significant investment to create a platform that can propel aspiring app publishers into a stable, supported app experience with a significant headstart in development time and saving on resources.
As always - we are firmly committed to supporting the UNA community on their development journies - we can't wait to make NEO a general release, but this cannot be achieved until we know the script is 100% stable as it will no doubt requires significant resources to support our community as they learn to work with it.
I hope that all makes sense - we will continue to update you as NEO evolves, we are planning a few more snippet updates shortly and hopefully a more detailed walk through very soon.
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Sounds great! But please would you mind giving us at least an ETA? We are all waiting for NEO. Thanks.
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Has it been discussed as far as development as to cost for ongoing maintenance and enhancements? Apps need to keep up with OS improvements and such. As someone who has been deploying apps since 2012, while the initial release is exciting, users often discover bugs that developers did not root out in beta. Is such maintenance included in the flat rate?
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Of course, I don’t dispute the price charged for personalized support it comes with a cost, and custom configurations can be extremely expensive. Every company has the right to set its own prices for custom development. However, open source applications are typically made available for developers to download, test, and contribute to. That’s the core principle on which open source communities operate.
In this case, there is no download link or public repository provided for the script that is claimed to be open source. Any open source project can be shared with a development tag (dev), which does not guarantee full functionality or official support and that’s perfectly acceptable. Still, experienced developers could provide valuable feedback that might significantly accelerate the path to a stable production version.
I am confident that many in the community have the technical expertise to contribute meaningfully, just as they do with countless other open source projects.
Moreover, although it has been promised for over two years that this project would become open source, that has yet to happen. You claim the script is functional and that production-grade websites can already be built with it and that may very well be true. But from the outside, it seems that the open source community and especially the premium community that actively supports UNA is being completely ignored when it comes to participating in testing, development, and early access to the dev code.
As a result, what it looks like to us the users is that UNA has effectively evolved into a closed-source system, no longer offering full access to the source code, while the applications built on top of it are being developed and sold without meaningful involvement from the community that once actively supported it.
As an example, here is a truly open source script provided under a dev tag: https://github.com/kabballa/dragonflydb-cluster. Anyone with the necessary skills can freely download and use it. For those who need help, I offer personalized implementation support starting from $10K and up but the code itself remains open source and accessible.
That’s how open source works: you share the code, and you monetize your expertise, not access. I don’t provide free support, but I don’t hide the code either.
But in the case of UNA, users are charged sometimes significantly yet the source code is not provided. That’s a paradox for something still claimed to be open source. You can’t call a product open source if there’s no access to the source code. Open source means transparency and collaboration, even if monetization is built around services and support.
I would like to ask if it’s possible to gain access to the NEO source code. I don’t require any technical support, nor do I expect it to be stable I understand it's still under development. My only intention is to explore it, test it, and potentially contribute.
My website is still in development and I don’t plan to launch it anytime soon, but it would be helpful to get familiar with NEO in case I decide to use it in the future.
Best regards,
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