http://hostilefork.com/2009/06/15/extjs-licensing-fiasco/

I found out about it only because “extjs fork” has been the top term bringing people to hostilefork.com. I’d happened to write about extjs before this whole fiasco. It’s not something I worked with since, but I like to give people what they’re looking for.

(Tangent! – I used to go to stores—like ones that sold lamps or something—and ask if they sold lightbulbs. The salesperson would say “y’know, people ask that all the time”. Then, I’d think to myself “if you’re in the business of making money, why don’t you buy a big box of lightbulbs and keep them under the counter?!!”)

The solution going forward seems obvious. Jack should retroactively declare all the 2.0 commits are LGPL. Extjs has already paid a hefty penalty compared to what would happen if they announced that only 3.0 (years out) was going to be GPL—which would have been their right. When you balance that against the pain 2.0 toolkit users have had shifting to jQuery UI or whatever, perhaps it could be called even?

I mean, why not? Isn’t it a shame to see this kind of bad blood in the open source community? Shouldn’t there be more mediators to keep it from getting this out of hand?

Now I feel like I have to close with “Peace Out”.

–Hippie Fork

After collecting all the submissions, plugins and improvements from their community, isn’t that what ExtJS have actually done themselves?

Jack – you may have had nothing but good reasons to make this move, that still doesn’t make it a good move in terms of the actual outcome. I think it’s not too late to correct what’s wrong. This is just going to hurt many ExtJS users but mostly your own company.

Lastly – I agree with Joshua – I started with Dojo and as much as I liked it, it’s no ExtJS. There are a couple other comparable alternatives but I’m hoping that ExtJS will just fix things up and regain everyone’s confidence.

Alan

And it is true that organizations can take an LGPL’d ExtJS, build a product, such as a GUI builder, and sell it without having to pay the ExtJS folks anything. I realized this among many other things when choosing to bow out of ThinWire development ( http://tinyurl.com/5kp8z2 ) and focus on TileStack instead. Personally, I wouldn’t want to be in the tools business ever again… it’s incredibly draining and it’s insanely difficult to make money at it because developers are used to getting dev tools for free.

The problem here is that ExtJS built it’s reputation on the back of much more liberal open source licenses, and then it pulled a switch job. Personally, I don’t think that’s too cool. If you want to be a commercial entity, then start out that way and build the company the old fashion way. Don’t pull a bait and switch like this. A better approach would have been to split the codebase and try to create an “Enterprise” version that would be purely commercial (i.e. what MySQL did).

One last thing… Alex… I like ya man… but Dojo can’t touch what these guys have done.

Thanks for your comment. Interestingly, Ext claim to be doing just fine commercially even before this move. They certainly have a large enough base that even with a very small percentage paying (and likely for support more than a different license in the previous versions) they could make a decent amount.

I think with this sort of product (a framework) in this age it is difficult to compete unless you go open. Even the switch to GPL may be a long-term mistake for Ext. Perhaps a better plan would be to concentrate on selling support and building commercial products on top of the open framework. At the shrink-wrap level commercial offerings can and do compete successfully with free alternatives.

Personally I consider the idea of selling free dead on delivery. Has anyone pulled it though ever, not considering the free-to-use-paid-support model?