eladgel
commented
4 years ago This could have been the highest starred library in react native if this was a LGPL or MIT
Open radex opened 5 years ago
eladgel
commented
4 years ago This could have been the highest starred library in react native if this was a LGPL or MIT
maxme
commented
4 years ago @radex @eladgel, We're thinking about changing the license or possibly dual license Aztec and Gutenberg-Mobile. I'll comment on this ticket when we have news to share.
SergioEstevao
commented
4 years ago @radex @eladgel the proposal to change license is now live in the Gutenberg repo: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/23651
Hi! Before you auto-close this issue ("we don't do MIT"), please let me state my case :)
I understand and respect that Wordpress itself (the engine, the apps) are GPL licensed.
I see how GPL makes sense for Automattic and is fair to the FOSS community. Automattic has a great business model that's not based on selling Wordpress itself. That's awesome - you can make money, and everyone has the code. And anyone can take the code and do what they want with it, but can't just modify it and start selling it as a product, hurting Automattic (and the community). If you want to make changes, that's fine, as long as you give back to the community.
So that makes total sense! (I know I don't have to explain GPL, but just go with me…)
Most packages in https://github.com/wordpress-mobile organization, AFAICT, make sense only as part of the Wordpress app, or are fairly trivial and have alternatives. Again - makes total sense to license them as GPL.
But I feel like Gutenberg is different — and if not the whole package, which is Wordpress-specific, but the more general parts, like AztecEditor-iOS and -Android.
Gutenberg/Aztec is not a product, but basic infrastructure for many, many kinds of apps — the vast majority of them not competing in any way with Wordpress.
And that infrastructure is sorely lacking. There are very few rich text editor libraries on both iOS and Android — and most of them suck. And if you want an editor that has a shared API for both platforms… you're stuck. There are no options - Gutenberg is the only game in town (and it's really good).
And it's very hard to create this infrastructure. WYSIWYG editors are very hard, and it takes entire teams years to develop them (and they still usually suck). Almost no-one has the resources to develop it just for themselves, and if they do, they're unwilling to open-source it.
On the other hand, there's a ton of developers and companies that have enough resources to at least help maintain and develop it further, when they face issues - to fix bugs, add a feature that's missing for their use case.
Given all of the above:
I can see the concern that people could take so much good work done by Automattic and contributors and not pay back to the community — so if MIT license is off the table, how about LGPL?
This would allow companies that don't have the privilege of a GPL-compatible business model to use it, but would force them to contribute back any new features and bug fixes to the broader community.
What do you think?