[OSGeo-Discuss] Re: GeoExt: call for participation

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 11:28:10PM +1100, Roald de Wit wrote:
> Hi Bart, Cameron and lists,
> 
> Now it's time to de-lurk I guess. I've been subscribed to these lists 
> for some time now and this is my first post.
> OSGeo Discuss members: this is a discussion started by Cameron Shorter, 
> 2 posts down in this email.
> 
> As Cameron points out: for our organisation the GPL (v3) license is too 
> restrictive.

I don't have context for this, since I'm not on the GeoExt list, but the
answer to this seems easy to me: GeoExt itself can be licensed in a
non-restrictive way (under BSD/MIT). Then, the resulting 'product' from
combining Ext + GeoExt is licensed as per the Ext licensing -- which
means that if you haven't paid, you're stuck with GPL, but if you own a
commercial Ext license -- which is not prohibitively expensive -- you're
good.

The only case this *wouldn't* work in would be the case where GeoExt
itself is GPL licensed. Since GeoExt has no license file or license
mentioned on their website that i can find at this time, I assume this
is, at the very least, still flexible, and you simply need to convince
the GeoExt community that letting you mooch off their code without
contributing back is worthwhile for some reason :)   

> Is there room for another project that wants to achieve a similar goal 
> as GeoExt but uses a less restrictively licensed JS library (like 
> jQuery's dual GPL/MIT license) and would there be interest from the 
> OSGeo-minded community to join forces to achieve that goal?

The Commercial Ext license is very open: I've not found *anything* I
can't do once I've paid for it. If GPL restrictions are a problem, it's
easy enough to make them go away.

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer