Thursday, May 29, 2008

Ajaxian's Dion Almer : At this point, the Ext walls are crumbling

After Ext went GPL, Ajaxian's Dion Almer states

"At this point, the (Ext) walls are crumbling, and Jack needs to make a big effort and come clean to his community to save the reputation of the project. If not, it will probably always be in a cloud of darkness as people are both confused and wonder about motives."

Unfortunately no such effort was made by Jack who is the Ext author.

Dion goes on to say

"With the current Ext JS debacle, you get reminded of how connected your project and business are to other people. Just because you own a company, doesn’t mean that you control it. When I think about my own company, Google, I realize that the most important currency is user trust.

It is a little like your tennis ranking. A rolling year of past performance is what really matters here. It doesn’t matter if you won that grand slam one year and one month ago.

With Ext JS, there was a strange situation. The original license of LGPL-ish was very confusing, which lead to a confused community. Some kind o change was required, and clarity needed to be brought in. Unfortunately, it seems that the move to GPL has caused more chaos and confusion. Developers who poured a lot of time into the community (e.g. by creating GWT-Ext) are upset. The chaos can rip the community apart and you end up with a true lose-lose."

Source :
http://ajaxian.com/archives/openext-the-fork
http://almaer.com/blog/ext-js-a-reminder-that-you-are-not-alone

Monday, May 19, 2008

Graeme Rocher : ExtJS uses community and kicked them up the backside

Graeme Rocher, Grails Lead, on ExtJS :

"The news that Ext-JS has, from one release to the next, changed from a modified LGPL to a GPL based license nearly made me fall off my chair. There have been many poor judged, and ill advised decisions made by software companies over the last few years, but this has got to be up there with the stupidist I've seen and I'm not even personally an Ext-JS user.

What they have effectively done is built up a community, taking full advantage of the open source model by accepting user contributions and patches and then turned around and kicked their own community up the backside. It is projects like Ext-JS that give open source a bad name. How can a company have faith in open source if the people behind it can't even decide how to license the thing?

When you start off in the software business you have to very early on decide whether you are an open source company or whether you are a commercial software company. If you choose the former then you need to choose an appropriate license. For platforms the GPL license can make a lot of sense (think Linux and Java) to prevent forks, force contributions etc. although I'm still not a big fan of it.

On the otherhand for libraries or frameworks only a few licenses make sense (Apache 2.0, MIT, BSD and to a lesser extent LGPL). With Grails we went for Apache 2.0 as one of the most liberal licenses out there. Once you've decided on the license as an open source company your job is the grow the community by attracting users who put faith in your product and the fact that its licensed in a liberal way. Those users would not come in the first place if you had a restrictive license.

By choosing the open source route you have made a decision as a company to promote the community driven approach. Of course this doesn't stop you from releasing a commercial version, you could dual license it as Ext-JS have done for those who want the comfortable feeling of paying for something. You cannot however, have it both ways you are either an open source company or you are not. Ext-JS seem to be stuck in 2 minds as to whether they really are an open source company, it is this indecisiveness that is going to see their community go elsewhere.

It is not like they're unique either, the Ajax framework space is super competitive and they've just dropped the ball and given their competitors a big advantage. My personally prediction on this one is that they'll lose a lot of users, probably to Yahoo UI and jQuery UI or possibly Dojo. Something else will soon come along to fill their space and soon they will have lost their competitive advantage, their users and all those license renewals."

Source : http://graemerocher.blogspot.com/2008/04/choosing-and-oss-license-and-ext-js.html

Friday, May 16, 2008

John Resig : ExtJS is very sneaky and quite disingenuous

Here's what John Resig, JQuery lead has to say about ExtJS

"ExtJS is a giant licensing fail pile masquerading as an open source project in a thinly-veiled attempt to force more people to buy their corporate licenses. Unless you're willing to shell out the big money, stay far - far - away.

They're using 'open source' as a buzzword selling point to lure companies in, befuddle them with confusing viral licensing, and obligate them (through the obvious balking that the corporate lawyers will do) to get them to buy a full, corporate, license. It's very sneaky, quite disingenuous, and paints a bad picture for open source development as a whole.

We (the jQuery project) worked hard with them to try and fix bugs and add features for an ExtJS integration layer. They turned around and built their own, specialized, library (removing the need for any of our work) and then mutated the licensing into this bizzaro scheme that they have now. We can't, in good consciousness, even recommend their library anymore due to its very nature. On top of this they ended up hiring our lead evangelist to promote their work. I can't speak for everyone on the team but I feel quite frustrated and used.

They're providing a great disservice to the Open Source community in general. They consume with reckless abandon, it's impossible to even hope to borrow code from them, and they turn it all into a money-making machine. No aspect of that sits well with me."

Source : http://reddit.com/info/6gli8/comments/c03s6s9

Welcome to ExtIsEvil

This blog is intended to expose the deceitful actions of Ext, LLC. It will also document the outrage publicly expressed by well respected members of the community like John Resig from JQuery and Graeme Rocher, the Grails Lead.

The Ext team deletes posts on their forums that are valid criticisms of their manipulative and deceitful moves like the LGPL to GPL bait & switch without any notice to the users.

Who am I? As odd as it may sound, I am an Ext Premium User who has paid for commercial license and premium support but can't use Ext after it has gone GPL.

ExtIsEvil is a place for users to voice their opinions. If you've been stiffed by Ext, LLC or would like to share any of your experiences please email extisevil@gmail.com and I'll post the contents here.