Now and again, I look at the searches that bring people to hostilefork.com For some period of time, the largest search phrase bringing people here is “extjs fork”. Sadly, they aren’t looking for the articles I wrote in 2007. Instead…it turns out there was a huge backlash against the Extjs project surrounding a change of the license from LGPL to GPL.

People have been up in arms and threatening to fork the codebase, and independently develop it under the previous contract. (To the best of my knowledge, the only place such a forked codebase has been posted is OpenEXT. But with very few commits and the most recent patch being applied in October of 2008 it is not too promising.)

Since people are finding my blog because of this question, I’ll take a stab at addressing the issue and offer my thoughts. I think they made a mistake in doing this change the way they did. Extjs should revert the current 2.0 repository to LGPL—applying the GPL to only 3.0 and beyond—so anyone using v2 who needs LGPL can use all the bugfixes that body of code has.

I’ll explain in more detail.

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