Joking :)

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.

I think Jack/Ext simply did the inevitable; there are simply too many tire kickers wanting the world for free; and just as many thieves ripping your IP without any legal consequence. There have and always will be such people, those that complain as this “elucidation” of terms are just a manifestation of this crowd’s lamentations.

GPLV3 is only restrictive in the fact that you cannot redistribute Ext with a closed source license under this license’s umbrella. Ext has that if you want to redistribute in a closed source app – you should have paid up for a commercial license in the first place. The gripe seems to be “confusion!!!”, this has always been clear on their license page IMO.

We actually donated $$$ from the get-go before the verry first license change, and Ext/Jack actually forwarded twice what we had donated towards the price of the commercial license. That’s the kind of folks these guys are.

Continuing, I think that maligning Jack/Ext or qualifying it as “crumbling” is absolutely ridiculous. This article reads like a forum troll’s scribbles.

Where Ext is concerned, having wasted tons of time on absolutely every other AJAX framework out there, Ext is simply superior. If you are profiting from a commercial project that uses Ext, I don’t see why you would be so agitated as to pee in Ext’s cereal with license woes. Pay up. It’s cheap.

You know, not for nothing (and I know that some of my colleagues will not be happy I’m posting here), but…the question isn’t one of “it was free and now it’s not”. The real questions surrounding the license change (and Jack’s interpretation, at least from the rest of the controversy around this) is *what kind of limitations these terms impose upon your own software development, should you choose to use this codebase*.

Jack has every right (and should–we all need to eat) to determine how and under what terms his codebase is released. And for many, the viral nature of the GPL is there, in theory, to encourage releasing code as open source. And it is extremely discouraging when others (particularly companies formed to profit from your work without sharing either revenue or credit) simply interpret an OSS license as “I can use this without reservation”.

However, the reality remains–I would like to have some modicum of control over any source code I write, whether or not that means I’m giving it away under something like BSD or I am releasing it under a commercial license. If I write a CMS (as an example) and decide to base my administration on Jack’s code, having to release under the GPL can make sense–as long as I’m aware of those terms before I make the choice to take advantage of Jack & Co.’s fine work. If I’m not keen on the GPL (and personally I’m not), then I have every right to decide to use something else that fits better with my own goals.

I think the reality here isn’t so much the license change (as much as I personally don’t like the GPL, and I went through a bit of this when I wrote the ye old f(m) toolkit, which I released under the LGPL and regretted)–it’s the timing of it. Had it been me, I would have considered this license change to be worthy of a major release number (no matter if the actual functionality changed a lot), and I would have given plenty of warning to my existing user base before making this change.

Oh well. Lessons learned, and all that. For my part, I hope that the controversy does not make a discernible long-term impact on Jack et al, and that everyone as a community can learn from the experience.

(btw, it really drives me nuts that you can’t put p tags or at least line breaks in these comments…)

I have no intentions of starting my own brewery. Perhaps the original brewer can take up derivative brewers directly and leave me out of the loop. I do see it as my right to make use of any other cocktail recipes that other contribute under the required BNBBL license.

I once heard about a beer brewer who walked into a bar with beer and handed out mugs of good beer to everyone. On every mug of beer was a label with the recipe. In his hand he held a sign:

“Free beer.”
–
Soon, many people heard about the beer and the bar started to fill up – so many people he now needed help brewing and pouring the beer. Many people were now helping to pour the beer but he was very particular about the taste of the beer and needed to hire connoisseurs to help with brewing it. After discussion with the beer drinkers, he changed his beer policy to something they mutually agreed. Since he was now responsible for the people he had hired, he was advised to give his recipe some protection so people wouldn’t use it to create a duplicate beer. So he made a new sign and stuck it up on the wall.

The sign read: “This beer is free for you to consume. But if you sell it and make money off it, please kick in on the brewing. You may use the recipe on the mug to produce beer for yourself but you may not give beer produced with the recipe away.”
–
The bar continued to fill with people who had all heard of the free beer. Many of these people were not around when the initial discussion took place, did not bother reading the sign stuck on the wall and all they heard was all the talk about the free beer.

Then some expert beer drinkers, armed with sign readers came in and started saying the beer wasn’t really free beer because the sign made it so you couldn’t even give beer produced with the recipe away for free. Free beer couldn’t have those restrictions.
–
So the brewer changed the beer policy again, this time instead of asking that those that sell the beer to kick in on the brewing, the are now required. He took down his sign and replaced it with a neon billboard to make sure the message was clear and visible to all.

The sign read: “This beer is free for you to consume. However, if you plan to sell it to someone else and make money off it, then you are required to kick in on the brewing. You may use the recipe on the mug to produce beer for yourself and if you want to give the beer you produce to others you can as long as you create a sign like this one.”

Some beer drinkers, now drunk, decided that the brewer had scammed them into thinking they were getting free beer. They called him names, said his first sign was BS and decided to use the recipe and start a brewery anyway. The brewer, advised that his first sign wasn’t BS tried to deter them from making that mistake. One beer drinker, who also liked cats, decided to instead create preservative for the old beer attempting to make it last forever.

I once heard about a guy who walked into a bar and handed out free mugs of good beer to everyone. He told each customer that the beer was provided under BNBBL (Brewer’s not Beer Beverage license).

Later, the guy changed his mind and said that he will only distribute his beer either under BNBL or under a commercial license. BNBL granted him full “Quid pro Quo” access to anyone who let him buy her a drink, while the commercial license made you pay $200 for yourself and $200 for anyone who had even a small sip of your beer.

Most people were cool with that and planning to just drink the beers they already got and head home. After all, it’s his beer and plenty of people buy us drinks without implying any obligations. However, the guy then started going around the bar and trying to pull out half-consumed beer mugs from everyone’s hands. He was muttering about how the mug and the drink holder were actually licensed differently from the beer itself. He said that his “beer licensing team” was on the way to make people give back the beer or else.

At this point the guy who was telling the story erupted in profanities and fell asleep, so I don’t know if the beer guy won his fight. I guess a lot depends on weather anyone in the bar was a bigshot with a bigger and meaner “beer licensing team”.

I do doubt very much than anyone wanted any of this guys free or commercial beer ever again. But if he came back to the bar with an apology and one final round of cleanly licensed free beer for everyone with no strings attached, we would certainly consider paying for his future products or support services again.

PS: That ExtJS rest in peace.

In any normal situation, this would be accomplished by contributing patches back to original author. However, Jack blocked this possibility by dropping LGPL license option from the official ExtJS version. I am not allowed to distribute my patches under GPL, as it constitutes placing additional restrictions over GPL.

Baring contributing the changes to the official release, another commonplace solution is distributing the modified work with the contributors changes included. I tried this first with OpenEXT and Jack told me to “talk to licensing lawyers” and that “his legal department” told him that his license only permits redistribution of “assets” – images and CSS – with unmodified ExtJS.

Unfortunately I am not at the stage in my efforts to start a company where I have license lawyers or a legal department. I have no interest to fight with Jack, legally or otherwise. All I want to do is finish and distribute my applications on terms that any reasonable person would understand from ExtJS 2.0.2 license. If I have to make some concessions, fine, as long as they do not involve me discarding 9 months of my hard work.

I can not use commercial license because I frequently ask friends for free or low cost help with my code. Per Jacks terms, I would have to buy 20 licenses for one full time developer (myself). I do not have this kind of money.

So what I am going to do is follow restrictions that Jack claims on Ext 2.0.2 license, although I do not think they are legally enforceable or ethical. Instead of distributing my patches together with Jack’s assets or stripping additional restrictions from his license, I will make my patches work strictly on top of a virgin 2.0.2 distribution. Fortunately, dynamic nature of Javascript means that this does not pose any restriction in practice as any class or individual method can be trivially overridden.

I do not see how this can be objectionable if one concedes that ExtJS 2.0.2 license allowed it to be used with regular programs, as programming techniques for overriding methods are identical those for subclassing Ext classes or specifying OnClick handlers. At the same time, I am satisfying LGPL by releasing my patches accordingly. Jack will be responsible for compliance with LGPL of his own library for any of my downstream customers.

I will even package my patches as part of a usable AJAX application licensed under LGPL so that Jack does not complain about me distributing “development libraries”.

The only thing is, I don’t see how making me jump through all these hoops benefits Jack any more than just admitting the mistake in composing previous license and allowing us to use old versions of ExtJS on terms widely understood from the license document. If he is so “creative” with old free license terms, will people trust his commercial license? Given that users will anyway use and contribute to old versions of ExtJS, although having to jump through the hoops, wouldn’t it be better to just relicense old versions under BSD license? In this case, he can at least reapply any bug fixed and enhancements to his GPL+commercial new sources.

I apologize for the terminology used and I changed it. I don’t want that to be the main issue.

I believe that between this post and the one right before it, I have been pretty fair.

I repeat the fact that I think you have done outstanding work with Ext JS, and I can’t wait to see it continue.

it is *your business* and not mine or anyone elses, so you can of course do whatever you feel is right. Just as you have that right, others can disagree. I am hopeful for a coming together because I want to see Ext JS grow to its full potential, and I worry that it will never be able too if people keep pulling up the license issue.

I also personally do believe that this issue has spiraled, as these things can. I have nothing bad to say about you, and I do like to believe that there is no conspiracy theory here.

I look forward to a time where we can grab a beer and remember the crazy time that must have truly sucked for you…. but at least it is behind us.

Cheers,

Dion

One of the main points of open source is that your use of the software is non discriminatory. I note the following words from Jack Slocam:

Ext JS 1.0 is released under the LGPL, minus the Assets license as mentioned above. Shortly thereafter 2 major publicly traded corporations (names withheld) embedded Ext JS into their development frameworks. With no mention of Ext JS except in credits files that no one ever saw. No support for all the work that had been put into the framework. Neither one of them even contacted us. How can that be possible?

Welcome to the dilemma of an open source business: if you open source it, you can’t stop people using it for free, but if you close source it, then nobody will use commercial software from a small company. It appears that ext.js was trying to have it’s cake and eat it too. It was trying to get the benefits of opensource, but without granting the full freedoms of open source.

However, it now looks like ext.js has switched to using the full GPL without any extra conditions. Excellent! If that was as a result of the fork, then the fork has done a good thing of pushing ext.js to be really open source.

For those that criticize Jack’s ethics or business practices, let me say that it is very very vary hard to run an open source business, so give him a break and the benefit of the doubt. I expect he is more motivated by keeping his head above water rather than raking in the millions. I believe he may have made some optimistic interpretations of the LGPL to help to that end, but hopefully the switch to GPL will have resolved that. For those that want LGPL, the openEXT fork may be for them?

I expect (and hope) that Jack will find that his business now goes better with a real open source license, as large commercial users are much happier working with standard open source licenses than working out the details of special cases. I hope the commercial users respect the effort that Jack and community have done and consider support contracts and/or commercial licenses.

But Jack has to realize that the open source business model is about making a return out of

Yet here we are, discussing spoons and forks in all previous comments. Regardless of what the article says, since OpenEXT effectively splits the development path of the ExtJS project (they will provide patches on top of an existing version, which in some way or another introduce incompatibilities with the main branch), it is a fork. The term ‘fork’ was not chosen for this type of action, because it can be used to eat food, you know.