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Meteor is now MIT licensed

meteor.com

31–40 of 127 posts

Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed

#33
post #10

Cool I can now use this in my closed source project without ever giving any change back! Hate this GPL that requires you to give back anything if you let others get your product.

Until you want to use some CDDL-licensed code. Or some APSL code, or one of the many other mutually incompatible viral licenses out there. Especially in something like a web framework, where most of the clauses of the GPL wouldn't apply anyway. License dickwaving makes the community a worse place. Stop doing it, sit down, and code something.

Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed

#34
post #10

Cool I can now use this in my closed source project without ever giving any change back! Hate this GPL that requires you to give back anything if you let others get your product.

Maybe you should check out other MIT licensed frameworks and assess whether they have fostered a closed or open community.

Rails is MIT licensed and as a result we have seen a lot of companies build their web applications on Rails and build very successful businesses, but we have also seen a range of opens source plugins/gems and applications themselves built around Rails which have resulted in a better web community.

This is 2012, developers who care about something like Meteor also care enough about open source to give back. We don't want developers to be forced to make their products open source, they should feel compelled by the enjoy of helping others.

Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed

#35
post #9

Maybe I'm just not the audience for Meteor, because while it looks like a great project but as a nodejs guy, the fact that it hides itself away from the platform and turned away from the fantastic npm makes me sort of weary about it as a whole. But I imagine people coming from rails or whatever don't find this a problem at all.

I thought exactly the same, I really like the reactive programming principles they've brought. But without npm it's useless.

Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed

#36
post #8
post #2

I think we all sortof knew this was what it was going to be.

Honestly, I'm surprised. You've got a team of cracker jack developers who introduce a product that, frankly, isn't ready for prime time by any sane person's definition with the goal of targeting the majority of developers (e.g., not the most experienced, and not the ones operating at the top end of scale), with no real mention of license? I expected it to be a commercially licensed language, and honestly, was perfect…

I was surprised as well. I got a little scared when I read their email announcement earlier this week where they talked about this license announcement. I fully expected it to be some sort of commercial license due to the lack of information given previously and the polish that even their prototype unfinished product had.

As for the business model, I could possibly see them doing hosting. Although there's no shortage of node.js hosts, they could fine tune their service to work well with the Meteor framework and integrate it in a way that a generic node.js host wouldn't be.

Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed

#37
post #31

is there an open source license that says says free to use for people etc.. but if you have a company larger than x then you must support the project with $$$ ?

Anything's possible, but caution advised to anyone who tries this. It's not always apparent to open-source developers how much pain custom or obscure licenses cause in big organisations (ie the kind of paying customers in your proposal).

Even if it's just a normal license with a single clause variation, it becomes a different license from a tracking perspective. A lot of companies have standard policies on open-source and anything not following one of several popular licenses might be forbidden or require a drawn-out review process at best. This gets even more complicated when you consider packages might not be directly used, but be part of a dependency chain where you have to map out the whole graph in order to demonstrate compliance.

Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed

#38
post #23

Awesome - I was one of those highly critical of the original license, so let me be among the first in congratulating them on making this (quite major) change so quickly.

I was also critical, and agreed, this is a fantastic change!

Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed

#39

I think they should've tried to commercialize it. There is a real lack of good, new development systems these days. If you completely open source a new system, developers will just rip it off, contribute nothing, and it will go nowhere. So where's the incentive to continue making it better? Developers need to wake up, and realize that new, and substantially better systems can be built if they are willing to pay for t…

there is a huge difference between platforms and IDEs

Re: Meteor is now MIT licensed

#40
post #9

Maybe I'm just not the audience for Meteor, because while it looks like a great project but as a nodejs guy, the fact that it hides itself away from the platform and turned away from the fantastic npm makes me sort of weary about it as a whole. But I imagine people coming from rails or whatever don't find this a problem at all.

I thought exactly the same, I really like the reactive programming principles they've brought. But without npm it's useless.

Agreed. For this very reason, after watching the Meteor screencast, I immediately looked into alternatives such as derby.
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