Code Monkeyism

Programming is hard by Stephan Schmidt

April 22, 2008

When people don’t understand GPL and LGPL - or - ExtJS is history

The people behind ExtJS are funny. First they have changed their license to the LGPL, without understanding it in any way, now they’ve changed it to the GPL without understanding it in any way. They claim that server side code which creates HTML pages which contain ExtJS must be GPL, wuahahaha.

I’ve been running LGPL and GPL open source projects for several years, had lots and lots and lots of discussions about the very fine points of the LGPL and GPL and let me tell you the ExtJS guys have absolutely no clue. Which is a shame because ExtJS was a nice library. Now they’re history. No sane company will touch a project which changes it’s license frequently and has such an attitude towards the - dangerous - GPL.

Update: My latest thought. Although ExtJS is GPLv3 and the developers claim (falsely) that your backend needs to be GPL too, for internal/intranet applications you still can use ExtJS as you’re not distributing ExtJS.

Update 2: A little madness has a nice analyis on the switch.

About the author: Stephan Schmidt is currently a team manager at ImmobilienScout24 in Berlin. Stephan has been working as a head of development and CTO. He has used a lot of different technologies in the last 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.

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Comments

Norman Richards

Maybe this post should really be titled “When people don’t actually make a point in a blog post - or - at least I have have a catchy title and make a few licenses slams so maybe nobody will notice.”

April 23rd, 2008
James Lorenzen

1 from an extjs user

April 23rd, 2008
Peter Thomas

I think the blog post has enough points.

April 23rd, 2008
stephan

@Norman: I thought the points are:

1.) They have no clue about LGPL
2.) They have no clue about GPL
3.) The frequently change the license
4.) Conclusion: If you do that, your library (ExtJS) will be history.

Sorry to not have been clear enough for you in the post.

See my work on SnipSnap (GPL) and Radeox (LGPL) for several years concering the “[...] make a few licenses slams [...]“.

One of the finer points I made 5 years ago: http://snipsnap.org/space/2003-03-04 about LGPL, linking, interfaces and the Apache license.

April 23rd, 2008
GPL and ExtJS for Intranets at Stephans Blog

[...] No signal, no noise. « When people don’t understand GPL and LGPL - or - ExtJS is history [...]

April 23rd, 2008
Curious

“for internal/intranet applications you still can use ExtJS as you’re not distributing ExtJS.”

Aren’t u distributing the code to employees, who then, under GPL, have a write to your code?

April 23rd, 2008
stephan

@Curious: No, using a Software internally (installing GPL software e.g.) is not considered distributing the application. There may be a gray zone when you do “deploy” the application to a subsidiary. Not sure. But not inside your company.

April 23rd, 2008
Bob Buffone

@Author - “They claim that server side code which creates HTML pages which contain ExtJS must be GPL, wuahahaha.”

Lets just say that was true. Why in the hell would you license the product that way. Forcing people open source their entire product by using an Ajax library isn’t really way to build revenue or equity value.

Licenses are to ensure you can build value and protect our self, not screw the users of the product.

http://www.rockstarapps.com/wordpress/?p=100, I wrote up an article along the same lines.

April 23rd, 2008
LudoA

Stephan says is rather harshly, but I do think he’s right - and it definitely sounds like he knows his stuff. Hopefully the ExtJS people will notice your post and it’ll help them out.

April 24th, 2008
stephan

@LudoA: IANAL. I hope they change course to an Apache license and become successfull and rich.

April 24th, 2008
Jose M. Arranz

I agree with you stephan, they don’t understand very much the GPL nature in web projects.

Furthermore GPL can be used to build closed source *public* (Internet) web applications because you are not distributing the application (of course you must give the source code if you give the application to anyone). I think they should have used AGPL v3, AGPL was invented for network based applications.

ItsNat, Natural AJAX for Java, dual licensed AGPLv3/commercial license from START.
http://www.itsnat.org

April 30th, 2008
Jose M. Arranz

Correction: “GPL can be used to build closed source *public* (Internet) web applications”
I mean “server based web applications”.

April 30th, 2008

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