On TinyMCE 7 moving to GPLv2+ #9496
Replies: 3 comments 6 replies
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I completely respect your right to license your work how you wish, and I thank the whole TinyMCE team & contributors for all the value provided up to this point. This move will naturally put a lot of projects in a challenging position though. |
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One thing I really dislike is that you seem to treat self-hosted as a second-class or "only for enterprises" citizen. On your website you only directly sell licenses for the cloud version, with all the privacy implications that come with such usages. The only way to even get a license for self-hosted is to contact you/sales - that usually implies a very high price, and it's in any case a hurdle because now you have to interact with people can cannot just "click and pay". I get it, you probably want to avoid certain large companies (website/webshop builders and similar) using your software for free and making (lots of) money from it. And if you are a commercial company and use TinyMCE e.g. to write HTML emails to customers, then it makes sense to pay for it. But even if we as open source maintainers would be willing to pay for a license (certainly not at the currently published pricing though, at least purely private FOSS developers will not spend 50-100 bucks a month for this), anything based on number of users (or in your case "editor loads") is basically unlimited risk since anyone can install and use the application. Not to mention that the domain restriction also would not work for something people can freely download and install. Maybe you could consider providing some decent way for non-GPL FOSS to get a free license for the core functionality, if the project clearly has no commercial intent? Sure, it's a bit more work for you, but it'd solve most of the issues. At least if it's done properly, ie in a very informal way - not requiring signatures on documents, being restricted in how you can publicly voice your opinion about the software, etc.). - then I think it would solve the problem for everyone. |
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Hi folks -- Do you have any plans to support version pinning or integrity hashes on the hosted version? |
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Dear TinyMCE Community,
We're reaching out to share some important updates regarding the licensing of TinyMCE 7.0. As TinyMCE has evolved, so have our approaches to licensing, each reflecting our ongoing commitment to the open-source community but also the sustainability of the project as its maintainers.
After long and hard internal discussions, we have decided to release TinyMCE 7 under the GNU General Public License Version 2 or later, abbreviated as GPLv2+. Our intention with this move is bringing a fair balance among the project stakeholders: those who benefit from it and those who maintain it.
Our commitment to open source
We wholeheartedly embrace open source. Maintaining TinyMCE's high quality for over 20 years has always been a key priority for us. Our conviction is that open source software should offer benefits across the board:
We are not a company who has open sourced an internal technology we’re using ourselves. Tiny as a company lives solely on selling commercial licenses of TinyMCE and its supporting products to others.
Developing a rich text editor beyond the very basics is also quite complex – that is why so many developers much prefer to use a product like TinyMCE instead of building it themselves. But it also makes it difficult for the open source community to help out with development and maintenance of the project.
This means that paying customers are carrying the vast majority load to the benefit of its open source users. It also means we from time to time have to evaluate and decide what and under which terms we open source our product to the benefit of the whole customer base – open source and commercial alike.
Moving to GPL
We believe moving to GPLv2+ will provide a clearer differentiation between commercial and open source use:
What if you can't move to GPL?
We always have the commercial license available if the GPLv2+ license is not meeting your requirements. Read more about your options over at our website
What about older versions?
Older versions of TinyMCE remain under their original license. We will continue to issue security fixes for the open source version of TinyMCE 6 for some time to give you time to consider the upgrade to TinyMCE 7.
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