Open Source FLOSS Exceptions
April 27, 2008 by Jack Slocum
With our recent change to the GPL v3 some concerns have been brought up by the Ext Community. We are hoping to address some of those concerns via community discussion of two new FLOSS exceptions.
The first step for us is the Open Source License Exception for Extensions. It is currently in draft status and we are seeking input from the community before we have it finalized.
The intention of this exception is to allow for more liberal licensing of extensions, language packs, themes and open source developer toolkits and frameworks for Ext libraries under a variety of open source licenses. (Note: this exception is not for applications and does not grant any exception for the library itself. A FLOSS exception on the libraries for open source applications will be addressed in the exception discussed in “Next Up” below).
The discussion is here:
http://extjs.com/forum/showthread.php?t=33891
The latest draft is here:
http://extjs.com/products/ux-exception.php
Please chime in and provide input and feedback.
Next Up
After the Extension Exception is complete, the next step will be drafting a FLOSS exception similar to the one by MySQL AB for both Ext JS and Ext GWT:
http://www.mysql.com/about/legal/licensing/foss-exception.html
This exception will be for open source applications that use Ext JS. It will have a few distinct additional grants the Extension Exception doesn’t have (e.g. “bundling” will be ok) but won’t be applicable to extensions or toolkits, as that’s what the Extension Exception is for.
We would appreciate any input and feedback you can provide on it as well. We expect to move quickly and we will let the community know when there is a draft ready for review and input.
Once both those are complete, we also hope that those that participate in their review and drafting can also help us to create an FAQ explaining what they cover, how they work, etc by contributing questions that will be asked by open source developers looking to use them.
Summary
The community speaks very loudly and we have heard you. We are hoping these exceptions will not only provide for continued usage for open source users that are not able to use GPL code in their projects, but also with greater open source license flexibility than has ever been available for Ext JS.
Posted on April 27th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
Wow, that was fast. Way to respond to the criticism! We knew you wouldn’t let us down. We love your work.
Posted on April 28th, 2008 at 12:02 am
[…] Please give us your input! It’s not right the amount of personal attacks I have been receiving lately. I have people questioning my ethics, business practices and saying we changed Ext JS to GPL v3 because my (and I quote) “greed for money came before your moral ethics”. […]
Posted on April 28th, 2008 at 12:15 am
[…] Ken Udas wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt… via community discussion of two new FLOSS exceptions. The first step for us is the Open Source License Exception for Extensions. It is currently in draft status and we are seeking input from the community before we have it finalized. […]
Posted on April 28th, 2008 at 1:11 am
[…] Slocum and his team are listening, and appear to be working with the community to clear things up: With our recent change to the GPL v3 some concerns have been brought up by the Ext Community. We […]
Posted on April 28th, 2008 at 2:04 am
[…] under GPL (or to buy additional licenses from authors of extensions? Update: Jack seems to have response to this issue). The major problem, on the other hand, is the community can no longer trust Jack & Co. for the […]
Posted on April 28th, 2008 at 3:03 am
Jack, good to see your response to these ‘issues’. For my 2 cents worth, I think ExtJS is the best thing since sliced bread, and to show my support, I am going to go ahead and purchase a commercial license in the next few hours.
Keep up the good work, and never stop talking about your kids either…I know I can’t!
Posted on April 28th, 2008 at 3:28 am
Do you remember way back when Jack Slocom wrote JavaScript instead of legal documents? Good times…
Posted on April 28th, 2008 at 4:41 am
[…] Slocum and his team are listening, and appear to be working with the community to clear things up: With our recent change to the GPL v3 some concerns have been brought up by the Ext Community. We […]
Posted on April 28th, 2008 at 5:49 am
At this point, I’m lost in legal issues.
On Ajaxian, there’s a nice comment that tries to put things in order by asking the right questions:
http://ajaxian.com/archives/ext-js-responds-with-open-source-floss-exceptions#comment-263232
Maybe by putting the answers online on extjs.com will completely settle things once and for all, no matter what license ExtJS uses.
Posted on April 28th, 2008 at 9:57 am
This change in license is rather troubling to me. I will probably have to stick with previous versions of ExtJs that were under LGPL and therefore the ExtJs project is dead to me. The viral nature of the GPL is just too problematic even with the exceptions. I have been using ExtJs in my open source project mojoPortal (http://www.mojoportal.com) which is primarily licensed under the CPL. Even though CPL is one of the licenses in the extensions terms it still poses problems for me. I’m not a lawyer but I know I need to stay away from GPL code in my work or else I will need a lawyer. I really wish you had not made this decision to change to GPL. What a bummer.
Joe Audette
Posted on April 28th, 2008 at 11:36 am
What I need are answers to the questions on the ajaxian post as referenced by @Andrei Necaulau. Along with some more corporate-type questions below:
1 - I have a standard data table on an intranet-only webpage, and I’d like to use the Ext grid to render the data.
2 - I want to make an order entry screen out of vanilla ext components (using a viewport and json to build it). This would be available on my company’s client extranet, or on the intranet.
Is the new license scheme prohibiting me from doing this? It seems like I’ve been cornered into switching things to an alternative AJAX framework (yui, dojo, whatever), OpenEXT, or flex for the sole reason of licensing confusion…
Posted on April 28th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
The questions pointed out by Andrei at ajaxian are pretty good and cover most of the use cases for any developer. An example summary of that kind would really help my understanding
Posted on April 29th, 2008 at 4:48 am
It’s not my comment on Ajaxian, but thanks for attribution
But that is indeed what regular people should have somewhere to read. I kindly ask the ExtJS team to take all of those scenarios into analysis (and maybe other scenarios as well) and have it documented with the right answers.
Posted on April 30th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
I’ll second (3rd? 4th? 100th?) the request for responses to the questions in the Ajaxian thread; that’d be very helpful. I’ve read the GPLv3, but I’m not at all clear on how it applies to different types of web applications for JS libraries included but not required for site functioning (most responsible developers build helpful degradation into their sites…), etc. etc.
Thanks!
Posted on May 22nd, 2008 at 8:20 pm
As a developer of an Apache-licensed server app, I’m most interested in the FLOSS exception for open source applications.
We paid for a support contract on Ext with the understanding that we could distribute it as LGPL. Without this exception we will have to pull Ext functionality from the app.
We cannot switch licenses for our code at this point, and continuing to use a dead-end version of Ext is not attractive.
What is the timeframe for information on support for non-GPL open source applications?
Posted on May 27th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
Can someone simply explain to me (all of us) how these exceptions affect the possibility of Spring adopting Ext JS back into their web framework? There is a great blog that explain’s Spring’s move from Ext JS to Dojo…
http://www.sporcic.org/tag/extjs/
Posted on July 29th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
When is this going to be resolved? It has been 3 months since this blog post was created, and there is still no answer. There has been plenty of community feedback in the forums regarding the issue of FLOSS exceptions, community extensions, and GPL vs. LGPL. There are many of us who have (or are considering) purchasing a commercial license, and we just want to see the results of the discussions come to a final resolution so that we can all decide if we want to continue using ExtJS or not.
Posted on September 7th, 2008 at 10:09 am
In my opinion all this is not about ethics. It is about *law*.
Is it *legal* what you are doing? I mean, you have benefit for a long time of the help of many many people reporting bugs, creating tutorials, answering the forums and so on, all under the LGPL licence.
Now you want to sell the result of *their* work, along with yours.
What i’m trying to say is that this product can’t be *YOURS* after being under a LGPL for so long.
This project is not *YOURS* anymore! In my opinion this is not even legal!