Following in the steps of other software providers looking to protect their intellectual property, flexible installer company InstallAware today announced it has published the source code for InstallAware 2025 under a Business Source License.
In recent months, there has been a lot of discussion within the industry as to what constitutes open source, and if companies that use licenses outside of what has been certified by the Open Source Initiative can be considered open source.
Sinan Karaca, founder and CEO of InstallAware, told SD Times: “Finding the right license was one of the hardest parts of this undertaking, and we have made an effort to not claim that we are “open source” in any of our written announcements about this development. However we feel that this license gives us the best balance of being open, whilst not letting our hyper-aggressive competitors walk all over us, as we try to do the right thing.”
Internally at InstallAware, Karaca said there was complete agreement about sharing the source code. “Unlike the flagship Windows Installer product, this one has basically zero closed source dependencies, and is itself built using an open source compiler and IDE,” he said. “We still continue maintaining and supporting and selling the product, now with the added confidence of open source though! And if we actually get any contributions, that’d be the icing on the cake.”
According to the company, this major release of InstallAware 2025 frees developers from having to learn all the different, mutually incompatible packaging formats – from Linux, macOS and MSI/MSIX on Windows, with support for Apple Notarization and Microsoft Authenticode code signing. This enables developers to create native code software installers for all major operating systems from a single source.
Karaca pointed out that nothing is hard-coded in InstallAware 2025 setups. The installation process is presented in a human readable, graphical script, which adapts to the operating system and makes decisions at runtime. This, the company said, increases successful deployments, reduces support costs and improves the customer experience.
The InstallAware 2025 IDE filters the script through multiple designer lenses, each focused on one area of the installation, according to the company. In its announcement, it wrote: “For example, the Files designer helps setup developers drag-and-drop files to define the payload of a setup project, as opposed to manually writing script code with ‘Install Files’ commands. Since these designers transparently emit all necessary script code in the background, developers may at any time drop down to the … script editor to rapidly conditionalize execution flow, or inject custom logic, where needed.”