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A few days back I was reading a post on Sanjiv Jivan’s blog here http://www.jroller.com/sjivan/ where he had written about some companies starting a LGPL project and after a few versions changing the licensing to GPL.
GPL means that you are free to use the free software if your project is also GPL. If you want to use it for commercial purposes you need to pay. Otherwise you need to make you project GPL and publish your source code.
LGPL is a more free version of GPL where you are free to use the free software in your commercial projects. Your project need not be GPL or LGPL if you wish to use the free software for free.
There are many companies that start a project as LGPL. When a project is LGPL, many developers, small and large companies start using the software and also make considerable contribution to it. After a few versions the companies change the license from LGPL to GPL. Now all the developers and companies using the free software in commercial projects cannot use the newer version of the free software for free, they either need to pay or make their projects also GPL. While it’s no big deal to many to buy a (currently) reasonably priced commercial license for the free software, supporting such a move from LGPL to GPL is an extremely bad precedent to set in the OSS community that has flourished on the basis of trust. I consider it as an exploitation of the free software community.
An example of such a free software is Hibernate which was LGPL till their version 3 and suddenly changed to GPL in version 4. As Sanjiv puts it “What if tomorrow Hibernate says that version 3 (LGPL) has some serious bugs with Oracle, but the fix is only in Hibernate 4 which is GPL / commercial license and costs $300 / dev license. What happens to large number of users who chose Hibernate during evaluation of persistence libraries only because it had a LGPL license? The Hibernate team itself might have only invested say, 20 man years, but the large community has invested some 100,000 man years (just a guesstimate based on the userbase). At this point users are held hostage to either pay up or release all their code under GPL since they need features x, y and z that they have to support as the technology stack progresses. So the point is not whether Hibernate is worth what their commercial license is priced at. Had users known this was coming 3-4 years ago, they might have chosen an alternate library”.
The same applies to EXT JS which changed its license from LGPL to GPL in a minor release. When EXT JS was LGPL, many developers and companies used and contributed to it and Ext grew from strength to strength as the community made contributions to their favorite open source Javascript library - ExtJS. Users start contributing to wiki, spending inordinate time on contributing user extensions, and per LGPL contributing back their modifications to Ext by posting on the Ext forums.
Things start looking suspicious as the Ext 2.0 final license is full of ambiguities, designed to trick users into buying a commercial license, yet users were told Ext is LGPL thereby drawing more users in. And without any notice to the community, the Ext license was changed to GPL in a minor release. Now, isn’t this an exploitation of the open source community. All those who contributed to the software now have to pay to use the software.
Now it is upto the community developers to raise voice against companies that try to exploit the community for their greedy gains.
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