TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL
github.com
TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL
1–10 of 87 posts
Re: TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL
#2TinyMCE is switching to a licensing model akin to CKeditor's.
Re: TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL
#3I hope Redis's license being changed makes more people wake up to the reality of the differences between copyleft and permissive.
Permissive is, in practice, public domain. Any corporation can take your code and use it as closed-source. All they have to do is credit your name somewhere deep in the documentation, a completely meaningless gesture. They also can't sue you for copying "their" library. But that's about it.
Re: TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL
#4I hope Redis's license being changed makes more people wake up to the reality of the differences between copyleft and permissive. Permissive is, in practice, public domain. Any corporation can take your code and use it as closed-source. All they have to do is credit your name somewhere deep in the documentation, a completely meaningless gesture. They also can't sue you for copying "their" library. But that's about it…
Can you please clarify what's the difference between the two?
Re: TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL
#5I hope Redis's license being changed makes more people wake up to the reality of the differences between copyleft and permissive. Permissive is, in practice, public domain. Any corporation can take your code and use it as closed-source. All they have to do is credit your name somewhere deep in the documentation, a completely meaningless gesture. They also can't sue you for copying "their" library. But that's about it…
Can you please clarify what's the difference between the two?
The way I think of it is that with permissive licences the freedoms can be removed from the code, but with copyleft the freedoms can't be removed from the code. By freedoms I mean the freedom to study the source code, to run it for whatever purpose you want, to make modifications and to share the code with other people.
Re: TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL
#6I hope Redis's license being changed makes more people wake up to the reality of the differences between copyleft and permissive. Permissive is, in practice, public domain. Any corporation can take your code and use it as closed-source. All they have to do is credit your name somewhere deep in the documentation, a completely meaningless gesture. They also can't sue you for copying "their" library. But that's about it…
I have also personally moved from non-PD permissive licenses for my own works, preferring an explicit public domain dedication or equivalent, and occasionally using a full copyleft license. I do know they are technically different (one important aspect being the patent clause), but the value added by those permissive licenses is not really significant.
Re: TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL
#7In 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 modules are included in the same executable file” and “if modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space.”
If I’m writing a JavaScript library or a server-side framework or even bare metal microcontroller code, I’m not going to use the GPL, just because it’s not at all obvious how to apply the license.
Re: TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL
#8TinyMCE 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 LGPL, with some (what I believe were) misleading guidance into meeting the LGPL (they specified rules about keeping specific branding elements). They then jumped to MIT, and since moved some of the open plugins to their commercial offering. Now they're making this change.
Re: TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL
#9I hope Redis's license being changed makes more people wake up to the reality of the differences between copyleft and permissive. Permissive is, in practice, public domain. Any corporation can take your code and use it as closed-source. All they have to do is credit your name somewhere deep in the documentation, a completely meaningless gesture. They also can't sue you for copying "their" library. But that's about it…
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 software can be used by businesses as long as it is not distributed.
Re: TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL
#10I hope Redis's license being changed makes more people wake up to the reality of the differences between copyleft and permissive. Permissive is, in practice, public domain. Any corporation can take your code and use it as closed-source. All they have to do is credit your name somewhere deep in the documentation, a completely meaningless gesture. They also can't sue you for copying "their" library. But that's about it…
To me, this is, over the long-term, a self-solving problem. Especially for simpler projects.
It took a decade for GNU/Linux to get to the point where CTOs would throw it in the same category as commercial UNIXes, but when that happened, well... when was the last time you logged into a brand-spankin'-new HP-UX machine?
And that was an operating system, one of the more ambitious types of software projects.
Redis is trading short-term profit for their sustainability as a business. There are already forks that are FOSS; there will be more. Cloud service providers have every incentive to not have to pass on Redis license fees to the customer.
TL;DR: you can't effectively compete over the long-term with the FOSS branches off the trunk that your now-closed-source software branches from.