License change and update process concerns

[Axivolt]

Today, I was suddenly shown an "Account and license required" screen, which was quite unexpected and confusing.
Upon checking the Marketplace page, I noticed that the license has been changed from MIT to a new one:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/AvaloniaTeam.AvaloniaVS/license

Since Visual Studio extensions update automatically, users may not notice such license changes in advance.
This update process can be problematic, especially when it involves new license terms or potential payment requirements.

Additionally, suddenly showing a paid/licensing screen can cause panic or confusion, and may leave a negative impression about Avalonia as a project.

Suggestion
I would recommend keeping the current extension available under the original MIT license as a legacy / unsupported version,
and publishing a new extension specifically for Avalonia Accelerate instead.
This would preserve trust with existing users while providing a clear path to migrate to the new model.

AvaloniaVS plugin version

11.10.4.0

[nakoustix]

Also to add that the "grace period" was never active, since the end date lies in the past:

Subject to your compliance with this Agreement, Avalonia UI grants you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to use the Extension for any lawful purpose, including commercial development and deployment, until 11:59 PM UTC on April 13, 2025 (the "Grace Period End Date").

Guys, I love the project a lot and I also understand that you want/need to earn money from it.
Further I'm sure I could convince our bosses to pay the fees, but the impression you give your userbase with this pressured update and sudden license change with no easy way to rollback (if auto update was enabled) is really not ideal..

[ppaszkiewiczcom]

I think this is a typo and grace period is intended to end in 2026, no?

Nevertheless, I agree with the sentiment especially since I had some stability issues after the update.

[MikeCodesDotNET]

I want to address the concerns raised here:

Regarding the Grace Period Date

Also to add that the 'grace period' was never active, since the end date lies in the past: ...until 11:59 PM UTC on April 13, 2025"

This is indeed a typo in the license text. The grace period ends April 13, 2026, not 2025 and we'll get this fixed. The grace period gives all users a full 6 months from our announcement to evaluate and make decisions about the new licensing model.

Regarding "Sudden" Changes

"pressured update and sudden license change with no easy way to rollback"

We announced this change in our blog post here and shared updates through various channels. The 6-month grace period (until April 2026) is specifically designed to give users ample time to make informed decisions. This is the warning period. During these 6 months, you can continue using the extension without an account or license.

Regarding the MIT-Licensed Version

"I would recommend keeping the current extension available under the original MIT license as a legacy / unsupported version"

The original VS extension code remains MIT licensed and is available in a branch for anyone in the community to fork and maintain. We're not removing this option. If you prefer to use or maintain an MIT-licensed version, you're welcome to do so. Our only requirement is that you follow our trademark guidelines..

Who Is Actually Impacted
This licensing change affects approximately 37% of our user base, specifically, developers working for organisations with annual revenue exceeding €1M EUR. The majority of our users can continue using the extension at no cost.

"This would preserve trust with existing users"

Let's be direct: we give Avalonia away for free. It's used by huge organisations who are building commercial products and generating significant revenue. We understand developers often prefer free tools, but the reality is we need to generate revenue to continue developing Avalonia and growing the ecosystem.

We believe asking organisations with €1M+ in revenue to contribute back to a platform they profit from is fair and reasonable. This is about sustainability. We want Avalonia to thrive long-term, and that requires financing.

We understand this change may be unexpected, but the 6-month grace period is your warning period. We remain committed to being transparent about our path forward and building a sustainable future for Avalonia.

[E021ntox]

The Beginning of Avalonia's Decline.

[MikeCodesDotNET]

The Beginning of Avalonia's Decline.

Respectfully, asking large companies to pay for the tools they use is how sustainable open source works, not decline.

And the telemetry cannot be turned off, very good.

It can be disabled with a paid license. It's the same model JetBrains uses. Anonymous telemetry on free licenses helps us improve the product.

How was this conclusion reached—by watching our code?

Through anonymous usage telemetry that's been in the legacy extension for a while. The telemetry code is open source and auditable.

[nakoustix]

Thank you @MikeCodesDotNET for the clarifications.

We believe asking organisations with €1M+ in revenue to contribute back to a platform they profit from is fair and reasonable.

I absolutely agree with that as well as with most your points.

But I still agree with the original suggestion that

publishing a new extension specifically for Avalonia Accelerate instead

would have been a better upgrade path.

Let's give a devex perspective:

1. Minding my business / doing my job
2. Having auto update enabled for the extension
3. Restarting VS
4. Being asked to sign-up
5. Choosing "community"
6. Going page back in browser after reviewing license terms
7. Suddenly "not eligible" for community version anymore.
8. Skip logging in for now
9. Having multiple VS crashes over the next few hours
10. Start getting frustrated

Anyway, I will certainly give the new tooling a try (who doesn't love good tooling) and most certainly will get a business license.

I really appreciate the continued effort on that amazing framework and don't want to complain (in general).

[MikeCodesDotNET]

Going page back in browser after reviewing license terms
Suddenly "not eligible" for community version anymore.

I think that's likely my being a bit moronic. I'll take a look in a little while at why that would be happening and push a fix once I've worked out what's going wrong.

Having multiple VS crashes over the next few hours

If you can share some info on the crashes, we obviously want to fix those!

[MikeCodesDotNET]

So how to roll back to the MIT version now?

1. Fork the repo.
2. Change to the Archive branch
3. Build it locally
4. Install the built extension

The code is MIT licensed and available for anyone who wants to maintain their own version. If your organisation prefers this route over a €219/year license, you're welcome to do so.

[E021ntox]

Requiring enterprise users to pay is perfectly reasonable. However, forcing all users—including amateurs and learners—to be controlled by accounts is unacceptable.

[MikeCodesDotNET]

Requiring enterprise users to pay is perfectly reasonable. However, forcing all users—including amateurs and learners—to be controlled by accounts is unacceptable.

You keep raising new objections each time the previous one is addressed.

You’re complaining about needing an account on GitHub, using a GitHub account, to access an extension for Visual Studio, which requires an account. This is standard practice across the entire development tool ecosystem.

Being controlled

The MIT-licensed version of the extension hasn't disappeared. It’s permanently available. You can fork right now and use it forever. That’s literally what open source licenses guarantee.

Your project will be scrapped

This is just fearmongering. Your Avalonia projects won't stop working. Avalonia and the VS extension are not the same things. The UI framework is still open source. The old extension is still open source. You have multiple options, and none of them create any risk for you not being able to build with Avalonia.

You’ve made it clear you don’t like the direction we’re taking. That’s entirely fine. You don’t have to use the new extension at all. But you also don't need to repeatedly invent new disaster scenarios. I understand you may be frustrated by the change, but the hypotheticals aren't helpful.

[Werymag]

Delphi died a long time ago (now only a ghost remains of it), when it became more difficult for users to access the free IDE, and new versions of the environment were full of bugs. Do not kill Avalonia this way.
I think need an MIT version of the extension, with some of the functionality, without any license windows, and a separately paid extension with full functionality.
I just started convincing my colleagues to switch from WPF to it, and now this...

[MikeCodesDotNET]

Delphi died a long time ago (now only a ghost remains of it), when it became more difficult for users to access the free IDE, and new versions of the environment were full of bugs. Do not kill Avalonia this way.
I think need an MIT version of the extension, with some of the functionality, without any license windows, and a separately paid extension with full functionality.
I just started convincing my colleagues to switch from WPF to it, and now this...

There is an MIT licensed extension, buts it's no longer going to be maintained by us. You are free to build and maintain it yourself.

[Werymag]

There is an MIT licensed extension, buts it's no longer going to be maintained by us. You are free to build and maintain it yourself.

How can I roll back to the previous MIT version? The current (11.10.4.0) one has too many bugs, including critical ones (crashes, incorrect highlighting, XAML Styler stopped working and overs).

[oopscoder]

Worst extension ever, and color of XAML preview is so ugly. I was making tuturial for Avalonia recently, but if this kind stupid extension persist, moved back to Maui.

[110-kenichi]

There is an MIT licensed extension, buts it's no longer going to be maintained by us. You are free to build and maintain it yourself.

How can I roll back to the previous MIT version? The current (11.10.4.0) one has too many bugs, including critical ones (crashes, incorrect highlighting, XAML Styler stopped working and overs).

Here
https://avaloniateam.gallerycdn.vsassets.io/extensions/avaloniateam/avaloniavs/11.9/1747165301288/AvaloniaVS.VS2022.vsix

[110-kenichi]

Here https://avaloniateam.gallerycdn.vsassets.io/extensions/avaloniateam/avaloniavs/11.9/1747165301288/AvaloniaVS.VS2022.vsix

After I installed it, it automatically upgraded to the latest version. There's no way to turn off the automatic update.

On my environment, it does not automatically update.

[nakoustix]

Sorry to complain again, but I want to emphasize once more how inconvenient the auto-update process (to a completely new and unfortunately unstable product) was.

After a few hours with the new extension, several Visual Studio Pro (17.14) crashes, and unpleasant bugs that effectively disrupt the workflow, I wanted to go back to the old extension.
The worst bugs include:

• VS restarting after a crash and sometimes blocking the file handle to the exe, which requires a restart of the machine to build again!
• Auto-complete nonsense in namespaces
• Conditional classes marked as errors
• etc... I mean, look at the issues list

I imagined the downgrade would be easy:

• VSIX compiled from the archived branch
• Uploaded to the internal ProGet VSIX channel to make it available to colleagues.

Unfortunately, the reality was different.
VisualStudio did not want to install the extension.
Even clearing caches, etc. did not bring relief.
The logs didn't give me much insight.

This certainly can't be blamed on Avalonia and is probably due to Visual Studio's distributed caches.

But it illustrates how tedious it can be for users to simply return to their familiar environment when a completely new product with the same extension GUID is (automatically) deployed.

In the end, I took the radical approach:
completely uninstalling VisualStudio (out of frustration, I also uninstalled the 2017, 2019, and 2026 insiders toolchains), and reinstalling VS 2022 Pro and legacy Avalonia vsix.

This cost me almost half a day of productivity in the middle of an important project.

I would like this to be understood as constructive criticism of your update process and not of “accelerate” or even Avalonia itself.

I will continue to promote Avalonia as THE .NET UI framework and will also keep an eye on the progress made by accelerate.

Please don't hold it against me that I am still waiting to pitch for the business license under these circumstances.

[grokys]

Really sorry about your issues @nakoustix. We had given the extension to MVPs to test but unfortunately not all of the issues were found before release. This mostly comes down to two things:

1. The old XAML parser/compiler wasn't suitable for design-time so we made the decision to write a new, incremental one. This is a large undertaking and it looks like we missed some features there; XAML is a very complex language with a very bad spec and Avalonia adds a whole bunch of stuff on top of it. We tested it with many popular repos but we obviously missed features and edge cases.
2. Shipping Visual Studio extensions is challenging: there is no "beta" feed, no way to revert back to an old version, and the installer is full of bugs. It would have been really nice to roll this out more gradually, but unfortunately there's no mechanism to do this outside of asking people to download and install a .vsix, perhaps with hindsight we should a done a public beta in this matter, but I doubt that it would have reached enough people to be helpful.

Thanks for you candid feedback anyway, we're working hard to fix the remaining issues and hopefully you'll be enjoying the fruits of that very soon.

[fgsfds]

You can get the latest MIT version https://github.com/fgsfds/VSIXforAvalonia

[MikeCodesDotNET]

You can get the latest MIT version here: https://github.com/fgsfds/AvaloniaVS_MIT

@fgsfds appreciate you taking the time to fork the MIT version. Please take a look at our Trademark Policy to ensure your use of our trademarks aligns with our guidelines.

The current repository name "AvaloniaVS_MIT" violates our trademark policy, as it uses "Avalonia" as the primary identifier. The repo will need to be renamed to something like "YourNameVS for Avalonia" or similar.

Additionally, if you intend to publish this to the VS marketplace, the name would need to follow the same guidelines - you cannot use "Avalonia" as the primary identifier or suggest it's an official product. I'd suggest naming it something like "Community Maintained Extension for Avalonia".

Feel free to reach out if you have questions about naming.

[Arthur-Camatti]

I want to express that I too feel like the current ("old", MIT licensed) extension should have been kept on the VS Marketplace as a legacy and unmaintained version, and a new should be created for the new paid one, even if the option of manually building the extension is still possible (as others said, VS might auto-update and break it anyway).

[almightyju]

I've just ran into this license update and wanted to chime in with my situation and experience. Firstly, I want to make clear that I have nothing against the desire for you to gather funding for Avalonia, I've even contributed code myself.

The company I work for will likely not qualify for the community tier, our business has 2 devs and dev work isn't our main focus, I just decided to use Avalonia for cross platform support and the headless mode, and I get a project where I can use it maybe once or twice a year if I'm lucky; so incredibly little use and because of that I doubt my boss would want to spend on a license cost.

Today I opened up the avalonia source to look into a comment someone made on an issue that I implemented and got hit with the designer sign in license popup, and my initial reaction was "I really don't care to deal with this stuff, I'm just going to skip and look into it later", well it's later now and with how little I touch avalonia I just want to stay on the MIT version but you really have to dig to find any information on it and the answer of.

When I've encountered similar things with NuGet packages that require a license on an update to a new version, I evaluate the new version, work out if there's any need to update for our use case and if not just pin it to the previous version and go about my day. The problem with the VS Extension is you don't have any control like that, but you could very easily in your popup have a "Want to stay on the old unsupported legacy version? Install this extension instead" with a link.

The current popup tells me "pay up to use the designer if you don't fit community edition" which leaves a bad taste, the grace period doesn't help with that as I still have to deal with it at some point. There's no easy way to get the old version without digging around which makes it feel even more like you're trying to hide it as a scare tactic to get people to pay. Anyone like me who doesn't follow Avalonia on reddit/twitter/whatever just gets met with this popup and no way of "just give me back what I had that was working"

[DarkNoir]

Eeep! was going to give Avalonia a go but this looks like a mess. Good luck all.