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The ExtJS debacle: What should its licensing strategy be?

ExtJS is a cool JavaScript framework for writing web applications. It is, quite possibly, the best of its kind. My own engineers were salivating at the chance to use it.

Unfortunately, ExtJS is of many minds when it comes to licensing its product. It pretended that the software was LGPL, but only insofar as that meant many people using it...and many people paying to use it. (Hint to the ExtJS business team: LGPL and Apache licenses are impotent to compel payment.)

The company took the hint, re-releasing the code under GPLv3, causing consternation in some quarters. Why the concern? Well, because it meant that freeriders would now clearly have to pay, or distribute their own software under the GPL. Many don't like having to pay for value, particularly if it's GPL'd.

All of which has caused some to fork the ExtJS project. Given the dubious open-source provenance of ExtJS, this is not as easy (or advisable) as it might appear. If ExtJS were never truly LGPL, as the messed-up licensing would seem to suggest, then forking a proprietary product is called...copyright infringement.

It didn't have to be this way.… Read more

ExtJS: When open source is not open at all

I was really excited to hear about ExtJS the other day. It was billed as an open-source JavaScript framework for building web applications. Great! I went to the company's website and learned that it's actually dual-licensed. Even better! Maximum licensing flexibility.

But then I went to the company's licensing page and things got murky really fast. It turns out that the ExtJS won't allow you to use Ext under its LGPL (3.0) license "[i]f you plan to distribute Ext in a product that will be packaged or sold as a software development library, toolkit or plug-in-based framework."

It's a bit like saying, "You can use this as open source so long as you use the software how we'd like you to use it. If you have any money, forget open source: pay us instead."… Read more

Autodesk geography tool goes open source

Autodesk on Tuesday announced it will release as open-source software a tool that can convert geographic coordinate data from one format to another. If you're not a map nut, that's the challenge one might encounter switching, for example, from latitude and longitude to Universal Transverse Mercator--or from geocentric latitude to geodetic latitude, for that matter.

The software, acquired from Mentor Software and used within Autodesk products already, supports more than 3,000 coordinate systems, the company said. Norm Olsen, Mentor's founder and the programmer who created and supported the transformation technology, will be a senior software … Read more