I guess it is not clear enough on the website, because we keep receiving comments. I'll have to find some way to improve them.
Zero is 100% open source, and has been since day one:
github.com/rocicorp/mono/tre…
Although our prior products were closed-source, Zero is a different kind of thing. It's a big change to web app architecture and we felt it could only achieve its maximum potential as an open project. There will be tons of connections and integrations needed with all kinds of projects in the ecosystem. We didn't want anyone to have a reason to not use or build around Zero.
We've already gotten contributions to this effect for: svelte, solidjs, vue, next.js, prisma, drizzle, gcp, sst, windows, linux, various js build tools, and mongo, among myriad more minor contributions to the zero itself and the docs.
On a wider note, I've spent the majority of my career building open source software (greasemonkey, chrome, webkit, blink) and am very glad to get back to it. We could not figure out a reasonable OSS business model for our prior projects because they were client-centric. Zero doesn't have that problem.
Our loose plan is to make a business by offering a SaaS version of zero-cache, and also white-glove on prem support for larger enterprises. But bigger picture, it's clear that the web is moving to sync. This is such a big shift and will create so many opportunities, that we're not *that* worried about finding a business model immediately. Just focused on making Zero as good as it can be.
cc:
@theo