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TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL

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Re: TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL

#21

Post by dagw »

codedokode wrote: post #19
MatthiasPortzel wrote: post #7

In my opinion it’s a shame that the GPL is so clearly designed for licensing applications written in C being run by end users. When evaluated on that basis, it makes a lot of sense as a license. But there’s a lot of confusion around the license because it’s not clear how these concepts transfer to interpreted languages. The GNU FAQ for determining if two programs have been combined into a derived works asks “if the m…

> The GNU FAQ for determining if two programs have been combined into a derived works asks “if the modules are included in the same executable file” and “if modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space.” Does it mean I can put GPL code into a separate binary, communicate with it over RPC and use it in a closed-source product without contributing anything back?

That should be fine. In this setup you'd essentially have a closed source 'client' talking to a GPL 'server', which is allowed.

Re: TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL

#22

Post by Starlevel004 »

donatj wrote: post #14

There are 219 contributors going back over a decade. Did they all either consent to the repeated license changes or sign away their rights with an CLA? You can’t just relicense contributions willy-nilly - without an CLA or similar agreement assigning ownership, contributions retain copyright of their original author.

> You can’t just relicense contributions willy-nilly

It's a good thing that the MIT licence allows sublicencing, which means that you can add a single GPL file to a project to immediately relicence it to the GPL as a combined work.

Re: TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL

#23

Post by bogwog »

donatj wrote: post #14

There are 219 contributors going back over a decade. Did they all either consent to the repeated license changes or sign away their rights with an CLA? You can’t just relicense contributions willy-nilly - without an CLA or similar agreement assigning ownership, contributions retain copyright of their original author.

I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that I can create a fork of any MIT licensed project right now, and relicense it as GPL. I can't do that the other way around because GPL explicitly forbids it.

> without an CLA or similar agreement assigning ownership, contributions retain copyright of their original author.

Wouldn't that mean that any contribution without an CLA to an open source project is unlicensed? Meaning anybody using a project that appears to be MIT is actually screwed because different parts are owned by different people who can claim infringement since they never explicitly licensed it to you?

EDIT: SLA->CLA :P

Re: TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL

#24

Post by Tomte »

bogwog wrote: post #23
donatj wrote: post #14

There are 219 contributors going back over a decade. Did they all either consent to the repeated license changes or sign away their rights with an CLA? You can’t just relicense contributions willy-nilly - without an CLA or similar agreement assigning ownership, contributions retain copyright of their original author.

I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that I can create a fork of any MIT licensed project right now, and relicense it as GPL. I can't do that the other way around because GPL explicitly forbids it. > without an CLA or similar agreement assigning ownership, contributions retain copyright of their original author. Wouldn't that mean that any contribution without an CLA to an open source project is unlicensed? Mean…

> I can create a fork of any MIT licensed project right now, and relicense it as GPL

A common misunderstanding, but no!

You can incorporate the MIT project into your X-licensed project, and now have three parts you need to consider: the MIT project, your X project and your (presumably x-licensed) composition of the other two projects.

It means, for example, that when distributing your composite project, downstream users do not only have to comply with X, but also with MIT (for that part). So they havbe to reproduce the MIT license (they would not need to do so if you truly relicensed the code!), and they need to distribute the copyright marks of the MIT project etc.

Re: TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL

#25

Post by worthless-trash »

TheChaplain wrote: post #9
Mystery-Machine wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please clarify what's the difference between the two?

GPL forces you to always supply the source code but only if you distribute the application. E.g. if you fork Nano and sell or make binaries available for download for free, people have the right to ask you for the source code. If you don't distribute it in any form, then you don't need to.[1] With MIT you can fork, distribute and people can't demand anything. [1]: Contrary to popular misinformation, modified GPL soft…

> people have the right to ask you for the source code.

People you distributed binaries to have a right to the source code via the same method that the binaries are provided in. Or at least that was my understanding.

Re: TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL

#26

Post by rapnie »

depr wrote: post #20
donatj wrote: post #14

There are 219 contributors going back over a decade. Did they all either consent to the repeated license changes or sign away their rights with an CLA? You can’t just relicense contributions willy-nilly - without an CLA or similar agreement assigning ownership, contributions retain copyright of their original author.

Do you mean CLA? I said the same thing about the recent Redis change. Apparently, the old contributions are still under the old license, and new contributions will be GPL. Because the old license is MIT, those contributions can be incorporated in the new GPL version. So there the old contributions are not relicensed and there is no need for it. If the old license were GPL and they wanted to move to e.g. BUSL, then th…

Drew Devault forked Redis, made the fork LGPL, then got so many questions that he created a fun little licensing quiz:

https://fosstodon.org/@drewdevault/112156829031615403

Re: TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL

#27

Post by mhitza »

ssddanbrown wrote: post #8

TinyMCE provided a bit more information about this change in a GitHub discussion thread here: https://github.com/tinymce/tinymce/discussions/9496 As I posted there, this directly affects my open source project which is heavily tied to TinyMCE so I may end up forking, and reducing down to what my project needs to reduce maintenance scope & burden. TinyMCE have been jumping around with their licensing. They were under…

I very briefly took a look at your project and seems to be an entire application, for which I'd expect TinyMCE would be a wrapper around input/textarea fields to add wysiwyg functionality. If that's the case, I (and no sane person/lawyer) would consider your project derivative work, thus except for the need to relicense the code as GPL. If you get that in written even better.

Honestly a better choice for a library would always be LGPL. I don't know how TinyMCE even expects to monetize this thing...

Re: TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL

#28

Post by kavalg »

Starlevel004 wrote: post #22
donatj wrote: post #14

There are 219 contributors going back over a decade. Did they all either consent to the repeated license changes or sign away their rights with an CLA? You can’t just relicense contributions willy-nilly - without an CLA or similar agreement assigning ownership, contributions retain copyright of their original author.

> You can’t just relicense contributions willy-nilly It's a good thing that the MIT licence allows sublicencing, which means that you can add a single GPL file to a project to immediately relicence it to the GPL as a combined work.

IANAL, but this does not cancel the MIT license retroactively. MIT fork is still possible.

Re: TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL

#29

Post by mlichvar »

TheChaplain wrote: post #9
Mystery-Machine wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please clarify what's the difference between the two?

GPL forces you to always supply the source code but only if you distribute the application. E.g. if you fork Nano and sell or make binaries available for download for free, people have the right to ask you for the source code. If you don't distribute it in any form, then you don't need to.[1] With MIT you can fork, distribute and people can't demand anything. [1]: Contrary to popular misinformation, modified GPL soft…

Another way to look at it is that MIT gives freedom to the developers and GPL gives freedom to the users. It's a conflict between the two groups.

Re: TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL

#30

Post by Denvercoder9 »

donatj wrote: post #14

There are 219 contributors going back over a decade. Did they all either consent to the repeated license changes or sign away their rights with an CLA? You can’t just relicense contributions willy-nilly - without an CLA or similar agreement assigning ownership, contributions retain copyright of their original author.

They can't relicense contributions, but they can add new GPL-licensed contributions. That makes the whole work a derivative work in the sense of the GPL, which means the requirements of the GPL apply to all of it. Effectively this is the same as if all the contributions were relicensed under the GPL. The only significant difference is that you can still cut out a part of the code that hasn't been touched by a GPL-licensed contribution and use it under the terms of the MIT license. None of this violates the MIT license of the original contributions, as it allows you to do basically anything, including sublicensing, with the code, provided that you retain the copyright notice.
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