Spiritapp.io free use of gsap?

[lw1990]

If I make animations with spiritapp.io, which is built on top of greensock, for paid pages (like Netflix.com, Ancestry.com, etc) does that mean I need to pay for a commercial greensock license? I assume so just want to make sure. This information should be public and I couldn't find it ANYWHERE on their site so I'm making a public question about it here first, before sending them an angry email.

[GreenSock]

Hey @lw1990. Sorry to hear about the frustration with the lack of info on that web site. I appreciate you asking here. It shows that you care about honoring other developers' work and getting the proper license. You're exactly the type of person we love serving. 🙌

 

First, let me be clear that GreenSock has absolutely no affiliation with Spiritapp.io whatsoever. We love that they use GSAP to drive animations, and the author has reached out to us in the past to make us aware of it. Nice guy. We wish Spiritapp.io nothing but success...I just want to make sure folks understand it's not a GreenSock product. 

 

Your assumption is correct - if you use GSAP (which is what Spiritapp.io leverages) in a site/product/app for which a fee is collected from multiple end users, you'd need the commercial license that comes with "Business Green" memberships which are very reasonably priced based on the number of developers (not users). And of course that gets you all the bonus plugins too. Hopefully you'll find that it pays for itself very quickly when you consider all the time it saves you, cross-browser headaches, performance, and raw capabilities. 

 

As you probably know (it sounds like you've been hunting diligently for info), our entire licensing model relies on the honor system. We don't burn resources policing our users or chasing down violators. We focus our energy on making the tools better and better. We just released an update this evening in fact. We treat our users the way we'd like to be treated and trust that if we show them respect, it'll be reciprocated. That's how we roll around here. 

 

Anyone is welcome to create animations via Spiritapp and if they use those animations on free sites/products, it's totally fine with us - no special commercial license is necessary from GreenSock. It's only when multiple end users are charged a fee for the thing that uses GSAP - that's when the "Business Green" license is required. 

 

Are there any other questions we can answer for you?

 

Hopefully the GreenSock tools are serving you well. I'm curious what you think of Spiritapp.io. I haven't personally used it to build anything - I'm just curious about your experience. 

[Shrug ¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

Great question and wonderful response, I too found it hard to find clear references when I was looking at that site. Both when it released and even still to this day. They should preferably be more upfront and not be so vague on the their site.

 

Like on this page it should definitely state things clearly. Both in general and in the scope that @GreenSock expressed above as that's probably common. https://docs.spiritapp.io/gsap-plugins.html

 

The most they express seems to be on this page I think?

https://docs.spiritapp.io/tutorial-animated-menu-icon.html

 

Quote

 

Why using dash array here?

With the dash array we can create line segments from a path element, which we can animate over time. We can recreate the complete animation with this property together with the property strokeDashoffset.

For more information about the using the stroke-dasharray and the stroke-dashoffset, these resources might be useful:

• https://css-tricks.com/svg-line-animation-works
• https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/s/stroke-dasharray

GSAP DrawSVG Plugin

Because the Web Player uses GSAP as the default animation strategy for tweening, a better fit would be using DrawSVG plugin here, but this plugin is for Club Greensock Members only and therefore not suitable for a general example like this.

However, if you are a Club Greensock Member and want to try out the DrawSVG plugin in the app, make sure to add the plugin to your webpage and add the property drawSVG (instead of the strokeDashArray). Play around with different values (for example: 0 50).

 

 

That's also a good example of all the hard work Jack has put into both the DrawSVG and morphSVG plugins to work around various browser inconsistencies as he briefly mentioned.

 

16 hours ago, GreenSock said:

it pays for itself very quickly when you consider all the time it saves you, cross-browser headaches, performance, and raw capabilities. 

 

Here are a few other recent related more descriptive posts regarding inconsistencies (many more can be found via searching):

 

 

So since you may be buying a license, be aware of such things and consider using the GSAP plugins you will own. Doing so is outlined in that first post above about GSAP Plugins in Spirit. Thanks for inquiring @lw1990, hopefully you can nudge them to make things more clear on their site. 😉