TinyMCE provided a bit more information about this change in a GitHub discussion thread here: <a href="https://github.com/tinymce/tinymce/discussions/9496">https://github.com/tinymce/tinymce/discussions/9496</a><p>As I posted there, this directly affects my open source project which is heavily tied to TinyMCE so I may end up forking, and reducing down to what my project needs to reduce maintenance scope & burden.<p>TinyMCE have been jumping around with their licensing. They were under LGPL, with some (what I believe were) misleading guidance into meeting the LGPL (they specified rules about keeping specific branding elements). They then jumped to MIT, and since moved some of the open plugins to their commercial offering. Now they're making this change.
In my opinion it’s a shame that the GPL is so clearly designed for licensing applications written in C being run by end users. When evaluated on that basis, it makes a lot of sense as a license.<p>But there’s a lot of confusion around the license because it’s not clear how these concepts transfer to interpreted languages. The GNU FAQ for determining if two programs have been combined into a derived works asks “if the modules are included in the same executable file” and “if modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space.”<p>If I’m writing a JavaScript library or a server-side framework or even bare metal microcontroller code, I’m not going to use the GPL, just because it’s not at all obvious how to apply the license.
I hope Redis's license being changed makes more people wake up to the reality of the differences between copyleft and permissive.<p>Permissive is, in practice, public domain. Any corporation can take your code and use it as closed-source. All they have to do is credit your name somewhere deep in the documentation, a completely meaningless gesture. They also can't sue you for copying "their" library. But that's about it.
There are 219 contributors going back over a decade.<p>Did they all either consent to the repeated license changes or sign away their rights with an CLA?<p>You can’t just relicense contributions willy-nilly - without an CLA or similar agreement assigning ownership, contributions retain copyright of their original author.
I needed a WYSIWYG web editor specifically for HTML[1] and landed on Fastmail's Squire <<a href="https://github.com/fastmail/Squire">https://github.com/fastmail/Squire</a>>. It's MIT so you may enjoy it too...<p>[1]: not just the usual "we have a rich document model" that has plenty of options, but as in my input data is HTML, and conversions back and forth aren't reliable enough
Recently I was shocked when I came to know that both CKeditor and TinyMCE are now owned by the same parent company. The acquisition has happened silently, that many people think TinyMCE and CKEditor are different competing companies.<p>Given that they are from the same governing body, it's no surprise they want to make TinyMCE adopt CKEditor's licensing path as well.
Compared to other projects moving to their own weird licenses, GPL2+ isn't the worst outcome. It's interesting to see how the sentiment around open source is changing in the last few years
For my projects I prefer a permissive licence, specifically the MIT No Attribution Licence. People argue that corporations will just take your code and make it proprietary. They might, but an internal fork like that means that it's difficult to benefit from improvements in the original project. So in my experience corporations don't create an internal fork, they use the code as it is. Then if they find a bug for example they will contribute the fix to the project rather than forking, because it's the easiest option.<p>So in other words, corporations are more likely to use code that's licensed under a permissive licence, and so they're more likely to contribute, simply out of their own self interest.