About Neutralinojs
Every open-source project has a great history. Some open-source projects decide to share their development histories and internal processes with their developer communities to offer a fully-transparent project-developer relationship.
Neutralinojs hides nothing — it explains to you the entire source code, framework internals, security perspective, DevOps practices, project history, and even the financial side. We keep everything transparent to motivate you to build your own open-source projects.
History
In 2018, three Uva Wellassa University students, Shalitha Suranga, Deepal Samarakoon, and Chathumadhuri Hettiarachchi published a research paper about a theoretical way to build cross-platform apps using inbuilt platform-specific browser libraries. They initially planned to use "Neutrino" as the research project name, but it was already taken. So, they decided to use "Neutralinojs" as the project name (Neutralino refers to a hypothetical lightweight particle).
For the research paper, Shalitha Suranga wrote a small POC project for GNU/Linux and Windows to demonstrate the theoretical idea and published it to GitHub as an experimental open-source project. In 2019, the research paper authors started working with the software development industry. But, Shalitha Suranga decided to maintain the POC project alone as a hobby project due to the positive feedback received from the developer communities. Later, Kasun Vithanage ported the POC project to the macOS platform.
During 2020–2021, Shalitha Suranga rewrote the Neutralinojs POC project with a new WebSockets-based architecture. His goal was to make the project production-ready with a stable API, well-organized codebase, DevOps improvements, and developer-friendly documentation. Since this rewrite was so different compared to the original research project idea, he planned to re-brand "Neutralinojs" as "Neu.js". However, he decided to use the same name due to the existing Neutralinojs-related content on the internet.
In 2022, Neutralinojs passed remarkable development milestones and became a popular open-source framework for building lightweight cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript. During this journey, the developer community supported Neutralinojs with ideas and code contributions.
Current development
In 2022, Shalitha Suranga added the Neutralinojs project under the CodeZri non-profit organization to maintain the project, along with his other personal open-source projects.
Nowadays, he releases a new framework version every two months with support from very supportive contributors.
The project uses a community-driven development methodology. Developer community members and maintainers collaboratively work by writing code, reporting bugs, improving documentation, and discussing features.
Financial perspective
Shalitha Suranga often donates his time to Neutralinojs by writing code, reviewing pull requests, and planning future of Neutralinojs. He integrated EthicalAds and Google Adsense with the Neutralinojs website to generate revenue for his work. Also, he accepts donations from the developer community via his personal Patreon and GitHub Sponsors accounts.
Moreover, you can donate Neutralinojs via OpenCollective.
Neutralinojs has no plans to monetize the framework with paid licensing/subscriptions, paid support, or courses. Also, Neutralinojs doesn't accept payments to deliver new custom features or solve bugs in apps. Our goal is to keep improving Neutralinojs as a pure FOSS project under the donation-based financial model.
Read this article to learn how to build a community-friendly revenue stream around your open-source project.
We motivate everyone to build a community-friendly revenue stream around open-source projects!