Philosophy
Why Optimus UI exists, what it commits to, and where it stops.
Why This Fork Exists #
In June 2026 PrimeTek archived the PrimeNG repository and moved future major versions, starting with v22, to a commercial license. They explained their reasoning in their own announcement, and it is worth reading. Maintaining a component library of this size for a decade, largely for free, is genuinely hard, and we do not think the decision was made lightly.
It did, however, leave a lot of applications on a library with no further open source releases. Optimus UI exists for those applications. It is a community fork of the last MIT licensed version of PrimeNG, v21, and it stays MIT.
This is not an official fork and it is not endorsed by PrimeTek. It is a separate repository, seeded with PrimeNG's code and history, maintained by people who depend on it.
What We Commit To #
Four commitments, in the order we would want to read them if we were choosing a dependency:
MIT, with no second tier
Every package we publish is MIT licensed. There is no paid edition, no enterprise build, no feature held back behind a subscription, and no plan to introduce one. If that ever changed, it would be a fork of this project rather than a relicensing of it, because the code we inherited is MIT and so is everything we add to it.
We track Angular
Our release cadence follows Angular's. When a new Angular major lands, the priority is a compatible Optimus UI major — before new features, before refactors. Staying upgradeable is the single most valuable thing a component library can do for the applications built on it.
Bugs before features
We inherited a large backlog along with the code. Fixing what is broken ranks above adding what is missing. Feature requests are triaged and welcome, but they generally ship when someone in the community implements them.
No surprises in your bundle
The library sends no telemetry, phones no home, and requires no account or key to use. What you install is what runs.
What We Do Not Do #
Naming the limits is what makes the commitments above worth anything. Here is what Optimus UI is not.
There is no commercial support
No SLA, no support contract, no guaranteed response time. Issues and discussions are answered by volunteers when they have time. If your organisation needs contractual guarantees, this project cannot provide them and you should plan accordingly.
There are no premium templates, blocks or design tooling
PrimeTek's application templates, block library and visual theme designer are their commercial products. They are not part of what was MIT licensed, so they are not part of this fork and will not be reimplemented. Theming here means editing preset objects in code, which is documented in full.
We are not chasing feature parity with PrimeNG v22 and beyond
PrimeNG continues under its own license and its own roadmap. Optimus UI diverges from v21 forward. Some things they add, we will not have. Some things we fix, they will not. Treat the two as separate libraries that share an ancestor, not as a free copy of a paid product.
The bus factor is real
This is maintained by a small group of people in their own time. We would rather say that plainly than imply a larger organisation stands behind it. The best way to change that number is to contribute.
How Decisions Are Made #
Everything happens in the open, in the repository. There is no private roadmap and no internal issue tracker. What you see in the issues, the discussions and the roadmap is the whole plan.
Contributors earn commit access by contributing — the contribution guide describes the Contributor and Committer roles and roughly what it takes to reach them. We would rather grow the number of people who can merge a fix than route everything through one person.
Breaking changes are avoided within a major and documented when a major requires them. Where we inherited a name that no longer fits — the CSS cascade layer, the package scope, the icon library — we changed it once, at v1, with a migration schematic, rather than dripping renames across releases.
PrimeNG and PrimeTek #
Optimus UI is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by PrimeTek. PrimeNG, PrimeFaces, PrimeReact, PrimeVue and PrimeFlex are their trademarks. The rename from the inherited names — the packages, the CSS layer, the icon library — is a trademark matter, not a technical one, and it is why ng add ships a migration schematic rather than asking you to rewrite imports by hand.
References to PrimeNG remain throughout this documentation and the source, and they are deliberate. Attribution is the point: this library is PrimeTek's decade of work plus whatever the community adds on top. Pretending otherwise would be both dishonest and useless to anyone trying to find their way around a familiar API.
The code we forked was published under the MIT license, and we distribute it under those same terms, with the original copyright notices intact.
Sustainability #
The honest answer to "how is this funded" is: it mostly is not. OpenNG covers the hosting and the domain; the work is volunteered. That is a fragile arrangement, and it is the main risk to this project — larger than any technical risk we can see today.
The things that actually help, roughly in order of impact:
- Reproducing and triaging issues. A bug with a minimal reproduction is several times more likely to get fixed.
- Sending pull requests, especially for issues labelled help-needed.
- Answering questions in discussions, so the same answer is not written five times.
- Improving this documentation. Every page has a source file and every fix is welcome.
- Telling your employer you depend on it. Sponsored maintenance time is worth more than any one-off donation.
The contribution guide covers how to get started.