Time to Fork Ext JS and MyGWT
Monday, April 21st, 2008Bad news but not really unexpected for me, Ext JS and MyGWT (a.k.a. Ext GWT) have just changed from LGPL to GPL today. In a nutshell, Ext JS and MyGWT are now useless for free commercial use. If you have already based your projects on these libraries, my general recommendation is to continue using Ext JS 2.0.2 until a fork is available or you can transition off Ext JS.
Ext JS claims that it is a foundation you can build on. Well, I disagree when the license keeps changing to be far more restrictive around every major revision (i.e., BSD to LGPL to GPL). Even though LGPL is open to the library creator’s clarification as to whether the LGPL license extends to your JavaScript code, GPL seems pretty clear that all your JavaScript code will be affected by GPL as well. In comparison, even JBoss and MySQL – two highly controversial open source projects - never tried anything close to this to my knowledge.
If you are a manager, you might be tempted to just pay for a commercial license since the license fee may not seem large for you. Be aware that you will be committing your project to vendor lock-in. The logical next step for Ext the company is to take Ext JS completely commercial with an increase in license fees to feed its expansion.
If you are still on the fence about choosing between GWT-Ext and MyGWT, I believe GWT-Ext is now the clear choice. The author of GWT-Ext was the first to add the clarification that GWT-Ext can be used in commercial projects without worrying about the LGPL contamination. This pressured MyGWT to add a similar clarification after a week or so, but may ultimately have accelerated the MyGWT license change to GPL due to the potential profitability impact to Ext the company. Unfortunately, both libraries depend on Ext JS, and their futures may be somewhat murky now.