Ext JS: License Troubles with Their Use of YUI?

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, June 10, 2008 @ 12:56 pm

In this little post, Eric Miraglia of the YUI team points out that Ext JS' recent change from LGPL to GPL and their inclusion of some YUI code without including the text of the YUI license (BSD) may violate the terms of that license.

I don't think this is a serious infraction, but it does point out how important good will and amicable relationships are between open source projects that violate one another's licensing terms all the time.

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Comments: 4 so far

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1. 

   Dietrich — I actually made no comment about ExtJS’s use, which I didn’t examine. Rather, I made a general comment that:

   a) It’s okay to use YUI in a commercial product (as ExtJS does);
   b) all forms of redistribution require the YUI license to be present;
   c) regardless of how commercial products like ExtJS use YUI, the YUI community can always download and freely use YUI under the terms of its license.

   -Eric

   Comment by Eric Miraglia, Tuesday, June 10, 2008 @ 3:14 pm

2. 

   @Eric

   Yes, you’re right. Sorry if my post gave the wrong impression. My larger point wasn’t about whether Ext JS was in violation of YUI’s license or not. Rather, I was making the point that most open source project are pretty sloppy when it comes to adhering to the terms of other projects’ licenses.

   Comment by Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, June 10, 2008 @ 3:20 pm

3. 

   Dietrich -

   “I was making the point that most open source project are pretty sloppy when it comes to adhering to the terms of other projects’ licenses.”

   The spots of Ext JS that leverage YUI code are all doing so within the bounds of the Yahoo UI BSD license.

   For example, the drag drop core code includes the same header in the file, as it did when ported from YUI:
   /*
   * These classes are derivatives of the similarly named classes in the YUI Library.
   * The original license:
   * Copyright (c) 2006, Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
   * Code licensed under the BSD License:
   * http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/license.txt
   */

   or in the ext-base.js file, which also leverages some older YUI code:

   /*
   * Portions of this file are based on pieces of Yahoo User Interface Library
   * Copyright (c) 2007, Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
   * YUI is licensed under the BSD License:
   * http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/license.txt
   */

   Comment by Jack Slocum, Tuesday, June 10, 2008 @ 4:27 pm

4. 

   @Jack

   Thanks for the clarification. This sort of question is bound to come up as people stub their toes against the new license. There once was a time that LGPL was seen as “the debil” and GPL the true Open Source alternative. How times have changed.

   Comment by Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, June 10, 2008 @ 6:39 pm

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