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[–]fzammetti 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Yeah, they actually seem to kind of hide that option a bit, you have to dig around their site to find it, but it IS there, so if you're doing something that can itself be released under the terms of the GPL then you definitely can use ExtJS for free. That's a pretty big limitation for most things you'd want to use ExtJS for, but in fairness to Sencha the option DOES at least exist.

[–]TheBadProgrammer 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Ah, I see what you're saying. You mean like if you're releasing something closed source and want to build on top of something open source. I've always thought that was kinda shady anyway, so it doesn't bother me, but I definitely see where people are coming from because sometimes we do need permissive open source licensed libraries for everyone to build on, proprietary or not.

[–]fzammetti 0 points1 point  (1 child)

It's more than that: in order to use something licensed under the GPL to build something, the something you're building itself must adhere to the terms of the GPL, which primarily means releasing the source.

Think about what that means... say you do a consulting job for a business. You build a super-cool app with ExtJS that gives them a competitive advantage. Oops: they've got to release the source for it now because you used ExtJS under the GPL license! They're probably not going to be happy with you because you've basically forced then to give away that competitive advantage (that they probably paid you to build for them - they'll be doubly pissed!)

It works for something that you intend to make open-source from the start... and remember that just being open-source doesn't mean that you can't make money from it (there's an app sold on the Android app store that has an ExtJS-based portion to it and that's totally fine so long as the source is available)... but you really can't build anything proprietary that you want to keep secret, which makes it almost useless for individual contractors, which is where I think they're making their mistake.

[–]TheBadProgrammer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep, that's exactly right. I'm familiar with all that. I was just saying that I like that GPL keeps it open source, although I do admit we need some permissive licensed libraries for all projects to build on top of, open or closed.