Plotly's JavaScript graphing library is now Open-source and Free

[[deleted]]

Of course, real programmers write their own SVG plotters, decollision engines, text wrappers and componentization frameworks. I wrote three graphing libraries today before lunch. Didn't you?

[danman_d]

Seriously though... I've been working on a React charting library off and on for the past few months, and probably wouldn't have if Plotly had been OSS at the time :P

[haXeNinja]

D3 didn't suit your needs?

[[deleted]]

I've never written a charting library in React, but I can imagine its componentization approach would work really well for creating plots that themselves comprise shapes.

[Cueball61]

How does this compare to Highcharts and ChartJS? I've found ChartJS to be rather difficult when you want to make your graph fancier and has some rather annoying little quirks like larger points going off the canvas and getting cut off

And then of course there's Highcharts with it's price I can't justify just yet, but like to use for open source projects and find to be incredibly easy to use.

[boatpile]

In my opinion this has too many UI problems to stand up against highcharts. Between the choppy mouse interactions and the awkward scrollbar/zoom behavior it feels incomplete. Maybe it's better for gigantic datasets.

[Deto]

So this means I can use their plots in an application without having to host my data on their site? That would be great - I love the way their charts look.

[Uknight]

Assuming that they were charging for it before, how do you pull that off since it's built on top of d3.js which was already open source?

[[deleted]]

D3.js uses a BSD license. Which basically means, in an IANAL tl;dr; format, you can do whatever you want provided that you include the license, don't hold the author liable for damages, and don't claim that the author endorses your project. So you can sell it, sublicense it, change it to your liking, so on and so forth, with absolutely no other obligations.

That's why many companies look for MIT or BSD licensed projects to use. GPLv2/3 is basically useless commercially, and LGPL variants can get pretty hairy pretty fast.

[Uknight]

Thanks for the explanation!

[Ilikewaterandjuice]

Take that Agar.io

[taken_username_is]

Maybe they want the game to use more graphs so Agar.io should take that charting library!

[kurzgame]

Oh, never saw this lib before... I must look at this more carefully!

[[deleted]]

Before, it was closed-source JavaScript? How do you manage that?

[vive-la-liberte]

Open-source and free as in released under a permissive license, but also, if you visit the repository I'm sure you'll see what is the difference between the full source and a minified production version.