The problem with this IMO is that some enterprising person will just use regular tailwind (or another utility-css framework like tachyons) and re-implement all of these components and give it out for free, circumventing the license and killing the value of this.
Normally with themes it would be time prohibitive to do so, but the nature of utility-css is that it's relatively straightforward to implement each component, even without looking at the CSS that's obviously easy to inspect.
I think what they should do is build a tool that let's you build your entire site using these components and charge for that. Otherwise, I guarantee within a year of today, 2/26/20 there will be a free version of this on GitHub created by the community.
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On a side note, if some bored person out there wants to make a huge splash in the CSS community, figuring out a way to target a specific DOM element, create the equivalent of an AST and specify a "dictionary", which would be a utility-css framework (tailwind, tachyons, basecss, etc) and finally reimplement the targeted DOM element in the chosen framework would be amazing.
Assuming you buy into utility-css, that would remove all existing friction in adopting it. Then that would mean you could grab an existing theme [1] and convert it to tailwind components as desired.
I use Semantic-UI, which had a problem of finding sustainable funding. There is a community fork (Fomantic-UI), which does not align with my (business) needs: stability, bug fixes, long-term sustainability, rather than adding features left and right and becoming Yet Another All-Encompassing JavaScript-heavy Framework.
Tailwind-UI looks very interesting and I would have no problem paying for it, rather than getting a "free" version, if only for the long-term sustainability. Community projects often go through endless rewrites, and suffer from feature creep and lack of direction.
In a business setting (I run a self-funded SaaS business) I am much more interested in a framework that fixes bugs and is stable.
The only thing that worries me is that the pricing is one-time rather than subscription. How can the authors expect long-term sustainability with a one-time payment? Maintaining a CSS library is a continuous effort, not a one-time thing.
Semantic-UI is a perfect example of the atrophy that I fear with combined CSS and JS frameworks. I'm pretty bullish on utility-CSS (I prefer tachyons since it's much simpler than tailwind). I don't think frameworks should necessarily combine the JS and the CSS. Ideally you would have a competitive market of people selling themes, using utility-css components so you're not limited by framework, and then you can just use your own javascript that you're going to have to use anyway (alpine, react, ember, angular, vue, etc)
I think if utility-css frameworks get popular someone will abstract the components from the frameworks and things like tailwind ui will become unnecessary (rather it will just be utility-css-ui and will work with any css-framework that implements the "interface").
Semantic UI is the perfect example of why you shouldn't go with something that's generic. Unfortunately the project just became too bloated for one person to handle. Your concern about sustainability is a good one and that's exactly why many of the frameworks' authors sell themes. However, themes usually require a lot of work and are difficult to implement using the actual css framework. tailwind ui is different because if you had the theme it's really easy to recreate it because it's utility first.
Essentially, utility CSS is a philosophy that promotes having tons of general-purpose classes to apply style rules of extremely limited scope - usually(?) just one rule per class.
It might happen, but I don’t think it would kill the value. There are tons of free and pretty great UI kits, CSS themes, etc already. Adam Wathan has done a really good job building up a community around Tailwind, and that brand and goodwill is part of the value here, I think.
> There are tons of free and pretty great UI kits, CSS themes, etc already.
There are tons that look visually appealing, but very few I've found that take a component-based approach (where they document each component individually - or think about how they interplay with each other). I've found the CSS is usually muddled, they often have legacy build pipelines that has to be rewritten to fit with Webpack, and a distinct lack of flexibility.
If Adam solves that side, Tailwind UI will be worth the money.
If it causes other theme providers to up their game, even better.
> On a side note, if some bored person out there wants to make a huge splash in the CSS community, figuring out a way to target a specific DOM element, create the equivalent of an AST and specify a "dictionary", which would be a utility-css framework (tailwind, tachyons, basecss, etc) and finally reimplement the targeted DOM element in the chosen framework would be amazing.
This is quite doable for us at Protoship (we've built both a design-to-Tailwind CSS+HTML converter as well as a webpage-to-Sketch Chrome extension). It is a very appealing idea - to be able to recast any webpage into a Utility CSS framework, but I'm curious to hear about situations where it would've been useful in commercial work.
Even if they sell 15,000 licenses in a year, that’s over a million dollars each. Not everything needs to be recurring revenue, they can make a truckload of money In a very short time span.
I would expect their market is the group of professionals for whom doing that is simply not worth the time.
When your job is delivering high quality UX and there are always more apps to build in the pipeline, having someone give you a library of useful components works.
I have licenses for probably 4-5 of these, and they've all saved many hours of time, and resulted in avoiding the cost of a dedicated designer.
There's inherent value in supporting something with money though, it's likely to actually stick around and improve, rather than some hacky OSS project that will die in a few months.
> The problem with this IMO is that some enterprising person will just use regular tailwind (or another utility-css framework like tachyons) and re-implement all of these components and give it out for free, circumventing the license and killing the value of this.
No because I believe that for every enterprising person wanting to circumvent paying for software, there are that many people who want to support the entrepreneurial spirit Adam and company show, and pay for good work. That's what capitalism is suppose to be about at least, anyways.
I wouldn’t bet on that. Most people want things for free and would stole digitized assets if they can go away. In a way what you wrote is true, but I’ll reverse it: for anyone willing to pay, there are many...
Common fallacy. Historically there has been a system of morals that has governed capitalism. Capitalism is about making a profit but also increasing the general welfare. The true capitalist dream is to make tons of money and bring forth great societal good. It's only now where the US has becoming increasingly amoral that we see the "late stage" capitalism we see today.
Normally with themes it would be time prohibitive to do so, but the nature of utility-css is that it's relatively straightforward to implement each component, even without looking at the CSS that's obviously easy to inspect.
I think what they should do is build a tool that let's you build your entire site using these components and charge for that. Otherwise, I guarantee within a year of today, 2/26/20 there will be a free version of this on GitHub created by the community.
---
On a side note, if some bored person out there wants to make a huge splash in the CSS community, figuring out a way to target a specific DOM element, create the equivalent of an AST and specify a "dictionary", which would be a utility-css framework (tailwind, tachyons, basecss, etc) and finally reimplement the targeted DOM element in the chosen framework would be amazing.
Assuming you buy into utility-css, that would remove all existing friction in adopting it. Then that would mean you could grab an existing theme [1] and convert it to tailwind components as desired.
1 - https://themes.getbootstrap.com/preview/?theme_id=4231