[Psc] Finally: New licensing option for GeoExt3 (ツ)

Marc Jansen jansen at terrestris.de
Wed Apr 6 10:51:01 CEST 2016


Hi PSC-members,

As I have discussed with you 
(http://www.geoext.org/pipermail/psc/2016-January/000194.html), I went 
on to negotiate our licensing options with the Sencha people.

Here is a short recap of the current situation:

  * Since the Exception for OSS is no longer existing, GeoExt switched
    to be licensed as GPL software
    (https://github.com/geoext/geoext3/pull/16)
  * This might be problematic when people want to use GeoExt code with
    their correctly bought licensed software

After some back and forth a Sencha official proposed the following:

     > So if geoExt does not include our code, you could dual license it
    GPLv3 and Apache - the GPLv3 version to go with Ext JS GPLv3 and the
    Apache version to go with Ext JS commercial for closed source uses. 
    You'd probably want to make this clear to your users so they get the
    right version and don't wind up with GPL issues.  Apache could be
    Apache, MIT, BSD, free commercial, or anything that allows you to
    combine it with other work and go closed source (technically, going
    closed source is redistributing under a commercial license).

Effectively this would mean that we would dual license GeoExt, and the 
license of the actually used ExtJS determines which license from GeoExt 
actually applies to your code.

I personally feel this is a wonderful option we get back from Sencha 
here and I am very grateful that they offer us this in my communication 
with them.

Here is a rough outline what we could do starting from now:

  * Decide on whether we want to be dual licensed as outlined above (A
    simple +1, 0, -1 vote of the PSC in response to this mail would be
    enough, I guess)
  * Decide which other license suits our need. Since Apache was brought
    up by Sencha, I'd be willing to take that one
  * Discuss the wording of how we document the licensing everywhere
    (Sencha and I have talked this through but in the end we decide and
    simply make it totally cklear to our users)
  * Provide PR that actually does the change
      o We should make it absolutely clear what the options are (see above)
      o We should document this at several places
          + LICENSE.md at the repository root
          + LICENSE-FAQ.md at the repository root
          + every source-file header
          + on the homepage
          + some other place?
  * Do we need to get the appreciation of all actual committers again?

What are your thoughts?

Best,
Marc

PS: Once this is settled, I really want to have a v3.0.0 released. And 
then switch to a release often-strategy. But thats stuff for another day.


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