Code Monkeyism

Programming is hard by Stephan Schmidt

April 24, 2008

More cluelessness from ExtJS lead developer Jack on the GPL issue

Reading the excellent analysis on A little Madness about the GPL and ExtJS issue, there is more cluelessness in a comment by Jack Slocum the ExtJS lead. He claims that others

“[...] wrap it up and sell it as their own. [...] With no mention of us at all.”

Nope, that would be illegal in most countries. You cannot deprive the author of his ownership and tell people the work was yours.

If someone would repackage ExtJS he would be required to keep the headers and original copyrights intact. So by definition he can’t “sell it as his own”. This just shows how uninformed the ExtJS core developers are.

“Since we started we have been open source and that is the route we will continue on.”

Running a company with a distorted view on the GPL (”backend code must be GPL if it generates HTML with ExtJS in it”) is not “beiing open source”. The open source argument is just a fake front to make more money.

IANAL of course.

The sad thing is though that Java open source projects have learned over the last 10 years that an Apache license leads to much more success. Apache will lead to companies using your library, more developers and in the end more users. More users lead to more support contracts and more license sales. Few users lead to few sales. And with lots and lots and lots of users someone big will buy you (Oracle, Sun, Google, Yahoo, MS). The GPL model only works for standalone products like MySQL, not for libraries. I’ve needed to learn this the hard way too.

The most important point is: Open Source success is build on the trust of your community. Lots of developers are let down by ExtJS. If you destroy the trust - as ExtJS did - your project is history. Go jQuery UI, go!

It will be interesting how they fare against e.g. Tibco GI which is commercial but liberally BSD licensed.

Thanks for listening.

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Filed under: Copyright, ExtJS, GPL, Java, LGPL

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About the author: Stephan has been working as a head of development and CTO. He has experiences in different technologies since 20 years including Java, Rails and Python. Stephans main field of interest is maintainablity and productivity in software development. Want to know more? All views are only his own.

Comments

digital.alterego

Just stop the bitching now, it’s not constructive anymore. I think the ExtJS team learned their lesson.

Just stop accusing them that they just want to make incredible amounts of money, there is just no evidence for this.

April 24th, 2008
stephan

Sorry, I’ve missed the change of the license to ASL2.

April 24th, 2008
stephan

The main point of the post of course was “More cluelessness from ExtJS lead developer Jack on the GPL issue.” with “[…] wrap it up and sell it as their own. […] With no mention of us at all.” which is - IANAL - just plain wrong.

Out of several dozens of words, 13 were about money with money only mentioned once. No evidence? I thought Jack said the move was made because they are not making enough money, or am I wrong? And as I said this is sad, as the move will only lead to less money.

“[...] it’s not constructive anymore.”

I still think correcting misinformation by ExtJS developers about LGPL, GPL and licensing issues is constructive.

I wasn’t planning writing a third time about the issue, but Jacks comment I linked to is from today, in a thread I posted before, perhaps he should stop walking around spreading misinformation.

April 24th, 2008
Scott Fitchet

Good post. I’d agree it’s constructive if just to learn more about the positives and negatives of (and motivations for) various licenses, which I haven’t needed to consider much in the past.

April 25th, 2008
AkitaOnRails

Post like this are actually necessary. The Ext core team will not understand the point unless there is pressure from the whole community. No one listens if you don’t talk.

And I have to say that this whole discussion is giving me headaches. So, what is Ext? GPL? Is it viral in the server-side? Can I fork 2.0 or it is just not LGPL at all? Do I risk seeing 3.0 going AGPL? What are other open source projects that depends on Ext but uses BSD, MIT, Apache licenses doing?

It would help if someone could just summarize the whole thing. The Ext forum thread is just unbearable to follow right now.

April 25th, 2008
stephan

IANAL - my opinion:

Best ask a lawyer, but from my experience with license lawyers (and I had some) there are very very few who know this stuff, especially the fine points.

- 2.0 is LGPL from my view, you can’t restrict the LGPL, it will break all restrictions
- 2.0 is therefor forkable (in the current situation I would only do this after consulting a lawyer), the one who does this could become very successful
- The GPL does not make the backend code GPL. There is no court decision, but this is far outside the realm of current discussion. See Microsoft using GPL Javascript libraries [1].
- I’m quite sure - IANAL - that there is no problem for intranets
- GPL3 should work with the other licenses, at least it works with Apache
- When forking you need to keep the original headers and copyright

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/expression/scripts/jd.gallery.js but they have enough money to buy the library completely, should problems arise

April 25th, 2008
Jack Slocum

“Out of several dozens of words, 13 were about money with money only mentioned once. No evidence? I thought Jack said the move was made because they are not making enough money, or am I wrong? And as I said this is sad, as the move will only lead to less money.”

Please don’t put words in my mouth that I have never said. This was never about money, it was about *cleaning up* the Ext JS license. In particular, removing the proprietary license on the Assets distributed with Ext JS and additional restrictions imposed on top of the LGPL.

As of 2.1 our license is actually compatible with open source projects. Prior to 2.1, the mix of open and proprietary licenses made it very difficult to include in any open source projects. We were both privately and publicly bashed for this. Now we clean it up, and people (like you) with no knowledge of the situation at all make unfounded accusations that have no merit.

And if you are going to quote something said about the GPL, please don’t just take a piece of it, take it out of context and twist it to give your ridiculous post more merit. Thanks.

April 26th, 2008
stephan

“In particular, removing the proprietary license on the Assets distributed with Ext JS and additional restrictions imposed on top of the LGPL. ”

As said before, you can’t put restrictions on the LGPL. Most people concerned with the topic thought that imposing restrictions on top of the LGPL was void from the beginning.

“This was never about money, [...]”

To quote ExtJS freely, it was because people “freeloaded” on your work and you didn’t get money for that and they would “[…] wrap it up and sell it as their own. […] With no mention of us at all.” Which as I said is illegal.

So it is about money. Not about open source. And as I said, it’s sad because the GPL will not help the project, not help Ext LLC, not help the community and not help open source (the myriads of other licenses out there).

“[...] our ridiculous post more merit.”

Thanks.

April 26th, 2008
Ajaxian » OpenEXT: The fork

[...] are others [...]

April 27th, 2008
EXT JS and The Nightmare of (Open Source) License | Just Talk About Web

[...] More cluelessness from ExtJS lead developer Jack on the GPL issue [...]

April 28th, 2008
minuetto

[...] weirder with their switch to the GPL for the latest release. The community is up in arms and the deluge of criticism and backlash is threatening to completely swamp the [...]

April 28th, 2008
Web 2.0 - Vietnam » Blog Archive » Ext JS và Bài Học Về Mã Nguồn Mở

[...] More cluelessness from ExtJS lead developer Jack on the GPL issue [...]

April 29th, 2008
andy

I just threw out ExtJs out of my project.

May 25th, 2008
andy

Sorry, there’s an extra “out” in my comment - it should read “I just threw ExtJs out of my project”…

May 25th, 2008
Raj

We are in the process of throwing out ExtJS from our work. It is such a letdown. I had switched directions from dojo in favor of ExtJS, but now again another switch. Looks like Tibco GI or YUI may be the way to go.

July 18th, 2008

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