So since this question has come up multiple times; I decided to write a brief history of my involvement with NativeScript, Master Technology, ProPlugins, LLC and nStudio, LLC.
So this story begins a little over 5 years ago; I had been doing some Cordova/Phonegap development on a simple application for my wife; and its performance ended up being sub-par, ran into screen sizing issues, and a whole myriad of the common standard issues you run into with programming for a webview. Most these hybrid issues are much better now. At that point -- frustration was enough to make me decide to see if their was anything better.
I downloaded a huge number of platforms, React Native, Titanium, Fuse, Xamarin, you name it; I found a link to it I downloaded it and tried it out. After spending multiple days installing and testing things, I finally decided to using React Native -- it was the best of the bunch. A few days later I saw a article on a news site; saying checkout something called NativeScript. I figured, might as well -- I wasn't totally sold on React-Native and I hadn't started my project.
So I downloaded NativeScript v0.90 or v0.91, which was the first official "open" release in early March of 2015. I totally fell in love with it. It has a good template syntax, data binding and best of all full easy access to the entire native platform all using JavaScript. It really was the "perfect" mobile development system.
Now as to Master Technology, it was started a long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away... Almost 30 years now... So basically, in a nutshell this was the company I did all of my contracting work under. As such, when I started doing NativeScript work I continued to do all of my work under it. This is why you see a large number of plugins and NativeScript related sites with the Master Technology logo. One of the first, https://plugins.nativescript.rocks, started as a simple MD file on github...
However, that soon became unworkable when the community started adding multiple new plugins a week. So I created the first version of https://plugins.nativescript.rocks... From there images, searchcode, compatibility chart and many other community resources have been added...
After a couple years of working in the NativeScript community, I realized that as a sole contractor it was very hard to handle larger jobs by myself. In early 2017, I had the brilliant idea to start a company that would be more like a law firm, with senior and junior partners but geared for developers. I enlisted my co-owners Brad Martin, and Nathan Walker and we created a brand new company called nStudio in early 2017. From there we grew a bit, to the point we even added a new co-owner in 2019, Dave Coffin. We continued to grow adding several partners known highly in the community to our team like: Igor Randjelovic (NativeScript-Vue), Osei Fortune (author of many awesome plugins), Alex Ziskind (the tutorial master of NativeScripting.com). In addition we have developed strong ties with many other companies in the greater developer eco-system.
When any new NativeScript clients would contact me, I move them to nStudio. Any other clients (Servers, PHP, Clarion, Node, etc) stayed on Master Technology as that company is now more oriented to server side stuff, and nStudio was for all the mobile development.
One strange thing about having two companies is dealing with IP, so any IP that I had developed at Master Technology, remained with Master Technology. You will still see Master Technology on a LOT of sites and plugins in the NativeScript eco-system even though Master Technology only does a small amount of work in the NativeScript eco-system now.
In early 2019; as still one of the major open source plugin NativeScript developers; I realized that NativeScript community needed some way to fund plugin maintenance. We were seeing a great number of plugins that were not maintained and no longer working. The maintenance time on my own plugins, that were free to the community, became far too excessive for me to be able to keep them to a standard I'd be happy to have my name on, and still be able to feed my family. I got together with several other large plugin developers and we started ProPlugins, LLC. This has helped at least with a chunk of the plugins under our control; and so ProPlugins, was founded and is owned by Master Technology.
Now comes the most interesting turn of events in this entire story, one that I would NEVER have expected in a million years.
Because of NativeScript, I helped found two additional successful companies. Which just by itself is totally awesome! However, now nStudio, LLC has been able to purchase NativeScript and its assets. We now have control over not only our companies future, but the framework that was directly responsible for spawning nStudio, LLC.
As such, you should now see my name (and the other partners from nStudio, LLC) on the all the new pull request approvals and reviews for NativeScript. I do want to sincerely thank all the developers over the last 5 years who actually built NativeScript, and if any of you want to continue to work on the framework, please feel free to drop us a line at team (@) nativescript org.
Yea, you are doing your own stuff with your proplugin, this won't help the community at all, you don't give access to essentials plugins, check Angular, Flutter, they all provide awesome pluggins for free.
This is not how openSource work.
Your position, relative to the framework is not clear, not good.
I strongly believe everyone is entitled to there opinion, and I will say even some at nStudio agree with you about ProPlugins, which is why it isn't a nStudio project. 😉 nStudio has no financial and no ownership stake in ProPlugins.
For all purposes, ProPlugins is just another third-party company in the Nativescript eco-system. ProPlugins was started somewhere between one to two years to _before_ NativeScript even came to live with nStudio. It was started while Progress still owned NativeScript and I had many discussions with them over it. It hasn't worked perfectly, but it has worked considerably better than before. The closest open source funding model to ProPlugins is probably TideLift...
The NativeScript team does maintain a whole slew of essential/fundamental plugins (including some of mine), and in addition another developer started the NativeScript Community collective of free plugins. So there is actually a whole slew of plugins that are available totally free and are fairly well maintained. At this point you have a wide selection of free plugins. Lots of free choices.
I suspect if you were to count all the plugins that nStudio maintains (in both the nStudio and NativeScript namespaces), we actually probably maintain more than the Flutter team, and they have a 1 Trillion dollar company behind them. At nStudio, we actually believe solidly in NativeScript! It isn't just the latest fad, nor the latest job to step up in the company, or used to get the next bonus, it is a labor of love. We at nStudio actually care about what has become our baby... 🙂
Now as to my position, I am one of the co-owners of nStudio, I also solely own Master Technology (which I started a LONG LONG time before nStudio), and Master Technology owns ProPlugins (started after nStudio) and AppProtection (started before nStudio).
As for how it impacts me, pretty much any ideas now relating to NativeScript, I always first discuss with the NativeScript team. To eliminate any appearance of any conflicts of interest. This doesn't mean that, if the team disagrees I won't do it. If I feel it is in the best interest of NativeScript, I give nStudio the first rights to own the project then if nStudio passes on the project, and I still strongly believe in it, I'll do it using only my resources to do it.
Finally the last point I want to make, if you really feel that ProPlugins is the wrong direction, please put your time into the NativeScript community plugins, they really need all the help they can get. The best way to make ProPlugins fail is to actually compete with it and displace it with other free offerings...