Just Talk About Web
Techniques Behind Modern Web
EXT JS and The Nightmare of (Open Source) License
Author: Jimmy28 Apr
As you may notice, I’ve used Ext JS in a couple of my own projects. I can say Ext JS is a professional project and what Jack Slocum has been doing are better than any other projects in term of UI components: with a few lines of JavaScript codes, you can create an excellent UI that gives you a new experience you may never have with other JavaScript/Ajax libraries (though it’s still far from perfection as anything else).
I got the first experience with this lib since it was an extension of YUI (named YUI-Ext) and under BSD license for clear reason that YUI is under BSD license too. Time passed, Ext JS grew mature and could stand as independent project when version 1.0 came out. The license, therefore, was changed to dual style: user could either choose LGPL with additional terms (which was criticized for not being “open” enough, however) or pure commercial license. Yet, it was not really a problem for the community when user could still use Ext JS and all great extensions of it (under LGPL too) in commercial projects.
A few days ago, a minor version of Ext JS (2.1) was released along with huge sock that the license has been changed (again) to GPL v3. It means now you cannot use the latest version of Ext JS in commercial projects without purchasing commercial license and nastily, when you have commercial license, you may not be able to use user-contributed extensions which likely will be released 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 inconsistency of its license policy. What would happen if the license is to be changed again in future releases?
All right Jack, I know you have talent and you may need more money to pay for high-end developers but not that way. I, myself, will have to re-consider all aspects of legality for using Ext JS or just find the way to get rid of it to avoid all headaches.
Please read more about Ext JS saga here:
- Choosing an OSS License and the Ext-JS saga
- My response to Jack Slocum’s post on the GWT-Ext forum
- Ext Discovers Step 2 of the Slashdot Business Model?
- More cluelessness from ExtJS lead developer Jack on the GPL issue
- Are You At Risk? Abrupt OS License Changes
- OpenEXT: The fork
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6 Responses for "EXT JS and The Nightmare of (Open Source) License"
What’s it matter as long as we don’t have to pay for anything! Everything must be free! Free, I say, free!
If you ask me for a dime, I will not use your software! As I work for a huge corporation, I must use free software so the corporate leaders can buy bigger houses.
I demand freedom to have everything for free.
Why do we need software developers anyway? There’s already enough software out there! Let’s work to rid the world of software developers!
Instead of the Open-Source Initiative (OSI) mantra, let’s have the Free From Software Developers Initiative (FFSDI) mantra.
well, u can pay and tell Jack u r so happy to pay more 4 licenses.
The problem might not only be if you want everything for free (like in “free beer”), the problem is that it really gets complicated to include extjs into applications you want to distribute.
you have to reconsider to use extjs – even if you buy the licenses – because there might be trouble with the GPL. Well, if you don’t care, simply do it. But I respect OSS, I dont wnat to break the rules and yet I do not know if it’s okay by only buying the licenses.
As far as I know now, extjs or an other developer contributing to it is now allowed to incorporate other GPL goodies. I got a license and use the stuff, someone recognizes that and extjs is not valid for me any more… . extjs was LGPL licensed, so everybody was aware not to do so (though it could have happened), now it’s a complete other part of the story.
There are a lot of open questions now. Jack + developers are doing tremendous technical work and because of that I did never really understand his fears of forking . extjs = Jack plus his developers, everyone forking will never get it done the way (assumably the quality) he does. A pitty.
I thought GPL in general was dead for web-apps since accessing a software app over the internet is not considered as “distributing software.” Otherwise Google and Yahoo and other such companies that are known to use lots of GPL code will be forced to release all their code!
I was using ext for one of my projects and was updating some stuff when I came across the ext licensing brouhaha all over the internet. I must say the licensing terms appeared sneaky from the beginning when I started using the library, but since what I wanted to use it for appeared to be LGPL licensed, I decided to go along with it. One of the major reasons I decided to use it was that ext appeared to do some pretty amazing stuff and with a really nice interface. BIG MISTAKE. The library was horrendously hard to learn and to use and debug, not in the least because:
a) For a lot of the stuff in the API (which appeared to be well documented but was really not because a lot of it was just repitition of not very helpful comments) there was no contextutal information which can quickly tell a developer how to use the api (to get an idea regarding what I’m talking about, see jQuery API). Even YUI docs are better than ext.
b) Second, but more importantly, noobs were treated like crap in the forums.
Anyways I went along since the benifits seemed to outweigh all that. With the benifit of hindsight, it is now clear why it was not in the best interests of the Ext team that the developers learn to use the library easily and on their own – or how else would they make support money? Also, lacking the budget for as big a testing/development team as the open source comuunity, it was in the ext owner’s best interests to keep the real nature of their motives hidden until they had a commercially viable product ready.
This licensing fiasco is really the last straw. I really don’t have a problem with paying, its the sneakiness on the part of ext people that annoys me. I don’t care how many hours I spend porting over my code, but as of now, I have thrown out the ext-js library from my project.
Sorry to say, but Ext is managed by a Jewish ex-banker. What else can one expect but greed. They don’t want to listen to Jesus…
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