Code Monkeyism

Programming is hard by Stephan Schmidt

GPL and ExtJS for Intranets

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

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.

If you did like this article but you don't want to subscribe to new articles with your reader, you can follow me on Twitter or subscribe to new posts with your email:

Comments

Vick

How about extranets? As in a publicly available web site?

How about password-protected web sites (such as an online banking application for instance)?

What is your understanding about the GPL in these cases if we use extJs? Thx!

stephan

IANAL and I’m out of my waters. But a standard GPL should not be a problem for extranets. But that is just the common understanding of the GPL as I see it, Ext LLC seems to see this different.

The AGPL would be another thing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License

“The GNU AGPL is similar to the GNU General Public License, except that it has an additional section to cover use over a computer network. ”

This was probably what they ment but for some reason didn’t use.

Leave a Reply