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It's a question of whether a program using Meteor is to be considered a "derived work". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Link...
In Meteor's case, as it's middleware, the LGPL would be the more appropriate license anyway.
I get the feeling that they're searching for business models with Meteor. The most obvious one would be optimized paid hosting ala Heroku...
That said, GPL made me look twice. Mainly because client and server are so intertwined, that I assume the entire app would need to be GPL'd to use Meteor without getting a commercial license. Now I've nothing against the dual licens, and paying for a framework that makes us money , but before shopping Meteor around the company it'd be good to have some specifics on what they're thinking in terms of a commercial license model. I hope that's on their priority list. It's hard to motivate investing in something that may later turn out to be prohibitively expensive.
"The basic idea is that the source code is publicly available for people to look at and modify and that it costs nothing to use as long as you’re building a GPL application with it and give out your source code too" Can anyone confirm whether this is actually accurate? I'm not sure it is...
I've been reading up on GPL because I know little about the nuances, but I think you only need to GPL and provide the source code if you distribute it to others. Web seems tricky for GPL, but I thought that was the purpose of AGPL. Please correct me it I am wrong.
It will hinder contributions if they require attribution, however.
Personally, I'd prefer they just kept it closed source and charged money for it rather than making it "open source, but not really since you can't use it to build anything unless you give out all your code or can lawyer your way past this obnoxious, ambiguously worded license". I don't care about being able to look at somebody else's source code. I just want something that I can use. Meteor looked really cool until I…
Also, when they talk about contributing, they don't write about having to sign a copyright assignment, which they must do if they want to continue to own the copyright to the whole thing, and thus be able to dual license it.
Furthermore, "get in touch and we'll write you a commercial license" doesn't sound like something very easy to evaluate, compared to, say, a pricing page. "Well, how much ya got, anyway?"
It is pretty early for them, though, it would appear, so maybe it's much ado about nothing, and as they work things out, they'll make things clearer and/or change the license.
"The basic idea is that the source code is publicly available for people to look at and modify and that it costs nothing to use as long as you’re building a GPL application with it and give out your source code too" Can anyone confirm whether this is actually accurate? I'm not sure it is...
I've been reading up on GPL because I know little about the nuances, but I think you only need to GPL and provide the source code if you distribute it to others. Web seems tricky for GPL, but I thought that was the purpose of AGPL. Please correct me it I am wrong.
Meteor pushes a lot of code to the client. This most probably constitutes distribution.
See Sencha's take on this: http://www.sencha.com/legal/open-source-faq/
They make money by dual-licensing JS code.
It's a question of whether a program using Meteor is to be considered a "derived work". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Link...
Imagine if the client side libraries for Meteor end up in the Google CDN. Then you're only distributing your own code and linking against a separately distributed GPL library. Beyond that, you don't even care if the library is actually Meteor, you just care that it has the API that you use, meaning it can't really be suggested that you know you're linking against GPL code.
What about the server/client split? Could you make an argument that they're implementation agnostic to one-another? So why would you need to distribute your server side code just because you distribute your client code? Simple answer is that you don't under the GPL.