[Psc] GeoExt3 licensing questions / new options

[Marc Jansen]

Hi everybody,

You all know that we have relicensed GeoExt3 under GPL to be compliant 
with the father library ExtJS which has removed the exception for 
opensource libraries back in the day. See here for more details with 
regard to that change: https://github.com/geoext/geoext3/pull/16

This change can be difficult for users; consider the following:

  * A user has bought licenses from sencha for ExtJS so he is not bound
    to the GPL
  * He creates an appliaction and releses / sells it according to the
    sencha license
  * If he were to include (and extend) GeoExt3, his application would be
    infected by the GPL, since he cannot buy a commercial version, nor
    is our code released in away that it inherits the actuial license of
    the father library
  * He decides against using GeoExt (and with a reasoning I can totally
    understand)

In the past we were in touch with sencha to get back such an exception, 
so that we could release our code under a more permissive license, but 
without success.

We have gotten an offer to buy commercial licenses for the GeoExt 
project though, for a price of ~5.000 US-$ for 25 licenses (I am just 
looking up the correct numbers, don't nail me on these). We have to get 
in touch with the sencha people again to confirm actual numbers.

We at terrestris have now three parties that are basically showing 
interest to pay for these licenses. Nothing is fixed, but they all 
generally agree that they want to do sth. in that direction.

Here are my questions to the PSC:

  * A) Would the PSC like to go this way further?
  * B) Do we want to dual-license GeoExt3?
  * C) Which questions do you think we need to ensure are answered by
    the sencha officials when we buy their licenses?
  * D) Do you see other important show stoppers?

I start with my thoughts:

ad A) I want to start one last approach at giving back our users the 
freedom of usage back they had with earlier versions. I volunteer to 
negotiate with sencha if ozthers agree. I don't want this to be a 
neverending story and as such I consider the outcome of this new 
approach to bve definitive (at least for me personally).

ad B) I can live with a dual licensing which would basically just state: 
"GeoExt is released under the GPL. In order to use it without infecting 
your application code, you can use any existing sencha license you may 
have. If you own sencha licenses for the base library ExtJS, these 
klcenses also cover GeoExt, and you are free to release (and sell) your 
code under the terms of the sencha agreement" (wording TODO), we should 
talk with sencha about this part.

ad C) Here is a list of things I want to talk with sencha about:

  * Is there definitively no option of granting just the GeoExt project
    a licensing exception?
  * What is a current offer (costs and number of licenses)
  * If we relicense, how are we to tell our users about this
  * Can we still accept contributions from all users?
  * Do we need to spend a license for every committer of the project?
  * What if a committer decides to leave the project, can we reuse hi
    license for another committer?
  * Can users of the GQL version still use the GeoExt library as they
    have before (e.g. just download it and have fun)? We do not want to
    force our users into buying licenses of sencha.

ad D) I currently see none.

Please tell me what you think.

Best,
Marc


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.geoext.org/pipermail/psc/attachments/20160118/9f9379fb/attachment.htm