54 comments

Add a comment…

Sign in

prestine

Your email address

Check!

invalid email

(thinking…)

Reset

or sign in with

• 
• 

UserVoice password

Forgot password?

Create a password

Your name

I agree to the terms of service

You'll receive a confirmation email with a link to create a password (optional).

Signed in as (Sign out)

Close

Close

Post comment Submitting...

• Kenji commented  ·  November 25, 2011 02:51  ·  Delete

  Poll: What is your opinion on CodeIgniter's change to OSL?
  http://twtpoll.com/afjzed

  Derek Jones says "I'm sure most users appreciate having their votes back after we've clearly answered the questions about the licensing change."
  http://ellislab.com/blog/comments/software_license_wrap_up_and_osl_3.0#comment-356919773

• kende commented  ·  November 24, 2011 16:32  ·  Delete

  I hope the status quo.

• AdminPhil Sturgeon (Admin, CodeIgniter) commented  ·  November 16, 2011 07:42  ·  Delete

  taka: Can I ask why? Opinions without reasons are no help in a discussion like this.

• taka commented  ·  November 15, 2011 03:25  ·  Delete

  I'm disagree to change to OSL license!

• AdminPhil Sturgeon (Admin, CodeIgniter) commented  ·  November 06, 2011 09:55  ·  Delete

  @deckard: I am involved in two open source projects yes, but how did you get to "schizophrenic" from that? I do not run either project and each project needs to pick their own licenses for their own reasons. Dan has chosen MIT for FuelPHP and I respect that, EllisLab have chosen to use OSL. EllisLab made decisions based on their lawyers advice, based on heavy research and they have done so for obvious and clear reasons. These reasons were not obvious to the community and they wanted answers, so EllisLab clearly explained everything about everything and fair play to them for that!

  These articles were a response to the community who all wanted answers. They were not intended to be arrogant and I strongly disagree that they were. Every post written by Derek was posted to the Engineers and to the entire EllisLab team on Basecamp and we all gave feedback where needed - hell I didn't really give any, I loved them. If I had thought it was arrogant, patronising or counter productive in any way I would have pointed this out straight away; as would the other Engineers.

  I find it bizarre that you think you have the right to pick a license for a company. What makes your decision better than theirs? How heavily have you researched license options? How much did you spend on legal advice for this matter and why would you choice be better for CodeIgniter than the team behind it?

  Kenji: I will agree with you to a minor extent, that the changes to the documentation - while were known coming for a long time thanks to the feature branch and the announcements at CICON - were merged into develop hastily and without a conversation. They were dropped into the develop branch around about the time we wanted to be thinking about releasing 2.1. The develop branch then had this license change put in and was repositioned to be v3.0 which was not great, and we were in a bit of a dodgy position.

  Everyone was worrying about user guide not being complete and this license change causing problems for their projects/websites/whatever. Not enough progress was being made on the new documentation and the develop branch was looking increasingly unready for release as either v2.1 OR v3.0, so I did the only logical thing available: prepare v2.1 without the new documentation or license changes. A rebase was proving difficult so I spent 5 hours on a Sunday night to create this branch. It contains a lot of very useful new features and has none of the controversial issues that are in discussion at the moment. Of all people vocal about problems recently I would have expected you to be behind this. A new version with a bunch of bugfixes and no license change issues? Surely thats a winner for everyone?

  Yes I can see that it is annoying for the translation of CI to Japanese, but why not just continue translating towards 3.0 and not worry about it? For example, I wouldn't stop working on a PyroCMS feature just because some third-party translation team (who had not vocalised their plans to me) were working on something - that expectation is a little bit ridiculous and it is the same for the CodeIgniter community.

  You said that bug fixes were missing and you very kindly provided me with a list of 5 or 6. That is probably about where the list stops but I may have missed 1 or 2 more. At the end of the day, if I got 95% of the bug fixes from 2.0.3 to where the develop branch was, that still means the next version of CodeIgniter will be 95% improved.

  The only thing we need to be worried about right now is testing the 2.1 branch and providing a list of bug fixes and issues so we can make a sweet 2.1.x branch and continue marching towards a 3.0 release which will be months away. There are some sweet features being worked on by the EllisLab team and the Engineers, so let's do that instead of arguing about license changes and uneducated complaints. I see nothing to worry about with CodeIgniter v3.0 being on OSL and as somebody with a business selling commercial applications on CodeIgniter I do not see why you are worried either.

• Kenji commented  ·  November 05, 2011 18:39  ·  Delete

  @deckard I agree with you in the point of EllisLab's relationship with the community. Their decisions are always all of a sudden. For example, switching to GitHub, switching to Sphinx, and this license issue. They have no schedule plan in advance.

  This way of EllisLab makes some people around me get angry, in fact. I think it because we have no time for preparing changes, and it implies EllisLab looks down on the community.

  We are translating all CI User Guide into Japanese. Switching to Sphinx was said before, but real switching was suddenly merely pushed into GitHub when I got up in someday morning. What can I do for it?

  After switching Sphinx, we sent a lot of time to convert HTML User Guide to Sphinx RST files. And what happened? 2.1 release branch was created. It is branched from the point before Sphinx convertion. It has HTML User Guide again. And 2.1 branch is been created by cherry-picking from develop branch by hand. So there are missing bug fixes in both CI code and User Guide. We must check the branch and search missing commits.

  I don't know why EllisLab is doing this ridiculous way, 'cause there is no explanation. It is not git-flow way.

• deckard commented  ·  November 05, 2011 10:35  ·  Delete

  @Phil Surgeon: If there was a real dialogue EllisLab would have discussed with the community in advance, not just changed it and afterwards publish a number of articles to arrogantly "educate" & justify their already-made decision - because that's what happened and that's just an eyewash - no matter the outcome. Not only they did not try to communicate in advance about this or asked for any feedback from the general community before they changed the license, additionally they screwed over all existing contributors by that. I am also wondering about you, Mr. Surgeon - on one hand you support the OSL decision being some lead dev for CodeIgniter, on the other hand your are a lead dev for the FuelPHP framework which is (who would have thought) under MIT license. Weird, heh? Yes, feels kinda schizophrenic to me.

• AdminPhil Sturgeon (Admin, CodeIgniter) commented  ·  November 05, 2011 08:38  ·  Delete

  dackard: Are you kidding? They spent a whole week writing articles to educate the community on why the change was made, what it means for everyone and why there is no reason to freak out.

  Those are some huge, well written and hardcore answers that people seem to be ignoring.

  http://ellislab.com/blog/comments/software_license_awareness_week
  http://ellislab.com/blog/comments/gpl_or_not_to_gpl
  http://ellislab.com/blog/comments/four_dirty_words_intellectual_property_trademarks_and_patents
  http://ellislab.com/blog/comments/contributor_license_agreements
  http://ellislab.com/blog/comments/software_license_wrap_up_and_osl_3.0

  Just because some moron has seen somebody say "OMG CodeIgniter is suddenly not GPL compatible" and has decided to switch away is a non-issue for everyone apart from them for one simple reason: CodeIgniter has has never been GPL compatable and it doesn't need to be. Why start worrying now?

  Read these articles. I was of course worried as I do not want PyroCMS to be in trouble, but after reading this it isn't at all. I'm not worried, you shouldn't be either.

• uzura8 commented  ·  November 04, 2011 17:05  ·  Delete

  I'm disagree to change to OSL license!

• Kenji commented  ·  November 04, 2011 15:25  ·  Delete

  Port project written on CodeIgniter to Symfony 2 -GPL issues
  http://www.freelancer.com/projects/PHP-AJAX/Port-project-written-CodeIgniter-Symfony.html

• deckard commented  ·  November 04, 2011 04:54  ·  Delete

  @Dennis: I got that impression, too. Their community does not seem to be on their list of top priorities.

• Dennis Rasmussen commented  ·  November 04, 2011 04:46  ·  Delete

  @deckard
  The problem is though that EllisLab doesn't make any direct profit from the open source framework, so losing a couple of users is probably not their biggest concern (or so I believe).

  Sure that the framework may be promoting EECMS, but that I'm sure they've already factored in.

  With this in mind, they can do whatever they want and not lose anything but short term loss in reputation by a minority.

• deckard commented  ·  November 04, 2011 04:15  ·  Delete

  I totally agree to Kenji. Fallout is already visible: I saw someone pulling their GPL components on the forums already and I had several talks with other people looking for a PHP framework being similar to CI in syntax so the port would be easier. If this uservoice will be ignored CI will be a future outsider as it will be the only framework using OSL as license. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Web_application_frameworks#PHP

• Kenji commented  ·  November 04, 2011 01:31  ·  Delete

  @Derek Jone

  To be honest, your hope is meddling for many people and most people still do not read the license. But I know you're right at least in legal perspective, and I appreciate the blog articles about Software License.

  Here in Japan, I have already seen some tweets like "Quited to use CI in next project", "What framework do I choose?", "I research XXX framework this month"

  About GPL compatiblities, have you read the page?
  http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html

  Ultimately, I want GPL compatible non-copyleft popular license, because I think it is the best for CI as framework. Now I think CodeIgniter License and OSL/AFL are demerit of CodeIgniter when choosing frameworks. There are some major frameworks with license I want.

  I hope CI will be a No.1 popular PHP framework.

  Probably OSL/AFL makes the CI community destroy at least in my country. I do not want it.

  But I know, the problem is EllisLab's legal needs.

  5 hypothetical scenarios, I will reply later.

• AdminDerek Jones (President/CTO, CodeIgniter) commented  ·  November 03, 2011 08:39  ·  Delete

  @Kenji - I'm sure that's certainly possible. My sincere hope is that people will actually read these licenses and see what it is they are agreeing to, and what they do or don't allow. You never replied to my 5 hypothetical scenarios on the blog post, which if you give some thought to, I think will assuage any fears you or anyone else worried about GPL have. I also have yet to hear anyone give a convincing argument as to why GPL compatibility is such a necessity. Most people are wanting the comfort of that label without understanding what it means or why they want it.

• Kenji commented  ·  November 02, 2011 19:07  ·  Delete

  @Derek Jones

  I think not a few people will quit using CI and avoid adopting CI, because someone wants to cut fee to laywers, because someone loves GPL, because someone hates copyleft.

  So it could be said, "with such a license CodeIgniter is pretty much useless for them." It is true, if I want to distribute my apps including CI under GPL, GPL-incompatible CI is really useless.

  Of course, I know it is not your hope or advice, you want the people to investigate their software license.

• deckard commented  ·  November 02, 2011 10:25  ·  Delete

  That is really comforting to know that everyone using CI and having license questions should rather consult a lawyer regarding the current/future license.

  Because that's so much easier than using a compatible license like MIT/BSD where you know what you get.

• AdminDerek Jones (President/CTO, CodeIgniter) commented  ·  November 02, 2011 10:08  ·  Delete

  @Marcel frankly, no one raised the question or made it an issue until now. And I bet no one ever would have if it weren't for the FSF's rant on their site about OSL. We've had a handful of people ask privately over the years, and we've always stated what our take was, but ultimately these are legal questions that need to be answered by a lawyer.

  How in the world does OSL make CI useless for most projects? You're not doing the community any favors by spreading such false claims.

• Marcel commented  ·  November 02, 2011 09:45  ·  Delete

  Derek, you said "It is neither Apache nor BSD, it has 6 simple requirements, at least 1 of which the GPL and FSF have a serious problem with."
  -> How does it come this was really mentioned before?

  -> Why don't you make the best of it and switch to a GPL compliant license so that there will be no more trouble for anybody?
  Planning to use OSL instead just seems to make everything worse and I fear this might destroy the community. With such a license CodeIgniter is pretty much useless for most projects!

• sire commented  ·  November 02, 2011 09:33  ·  Delete

  @Derek - My point was only that the wording almost infers that CodeIgniter is GPL-compatible, since Apache/BSD are. I can understand the confusion, all these years.