Move to GPL 2+

[fredck]

This issue is a follow up to an internal discussion where we agreed to set the Open Source license of CKEditor 5 to GPL 2+ only.

Our main intention with this move is bringing a fair balance among the project stakeholders: those who benefit from it and those who maintain it.

Who maintains CKEditor?

To bring clarity to it, let’s introduce CKSource - the company that maintains CKEditor.

CKSource is located in Warsaw, Poland. It’s a beautiful company that I started in 2006 with the objective of continuously developing and maintaining CKEditor. It has a modern and future-oriented team made of 40+ top-quality professionals.

As the maintainer of CKEditor, CKSource accumulates the following accountabilities:

• Design and develop CKEditor, which today is available as two independent projects: CKEditor 4 and CKEditor 5.
• Design, create and make available the best possible documentation for CKEditor.
• Design, create and maintain the CKEditor.com website and its services.
• Maintain the CKEditor CDN.
• Protect the CKEditor brand and develop its market share.
• Maintain the CKEditor social channels, blog, mailing list and other marketing tools.
• Maintain the CKEditor GitHub repositories, their issue trackers and keep an eye on Stack Overflow and the CKEditor 5 Gitter channel.
• Maintain the CKEditor internationalization team and its infrastructure.

Yes, it’s a lot of work to keep a high quality and successful Open Source Software going. All this done by the hands of the best developers and professionals you can find in the market. We’ve been doing this for more than 15 years already.

Who benefits from CKEditor?

Unlike many other Open Source maintainers, and because of CKEditor’s nature, CKSource does not benefit from CKEditor directly as an end-user or integrator. The ones that enjoy CKEditor are the companies that adopt it, who we call “the community”. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of companies and millions of end-users.

By today, CKEditor must have hit more than 20 million downloads, historically. The great-great majority of those using the editor do it for free, enjoying the benefits of our wide GPL+LGPL+MPL triple license.

From these thousands of businesses and millions of downloads, a very small group (less than 0,5%) decides to enter into business relations with CKSource. They search mainly for support and better commercial licensing conditions. In some sense, these are the ones that finance CKEditor so the great majority can enjoy it for free. We should be all thankful to them.

Open Source

We believe in Open Source. So much that we’re one of the few pure OSS projects that lasted that long. Of course, keeping the high quality of CKEditor has been always a decisive factor. Open Source Software should bring benefits to everyone:

• To those who maintain it:

  • Raise the quality of the software with the community testing and reporting issue. (“Issues”)
  • Having a community of developers helping fixing issues, developing features, writing documentation, supporting the community, etc. (“Contributing”)
  • Having an extensive environment of integrations and solutions with third-party software maintained by the community. (“Integrations”)

• To those who benefit from it:

  • The ability to see how the software is done to check its quality.
  • The possibility of fixing and extending the software.
  • Being sure that the software will always be there.
  • Being free as in “freedom”.
  • Being free as in “free beer”.

Those who benefit from CKEditor are enjoying it in full. We’re very happy and proud about it.

On the maintenance side though, CKSource has been alone for these many years. The one part where the community has been active is on reporting issues. We’re grateful for that as it played an important role in keeping the quality of CKEditor high. Another part, where the community has shown a great potential was the CKEditor 4 addons repository, where we saw plugins being created by users, however here we observed a tendency that the more complex the plugin was, the more often it was commercial.

When it comes to contributions though, apart from a few heroes that show up sporadically with small fixes, we don’t see much. At the same time, there are always those who press us for free support, and rant about issues they found, and are very persuasive when it comes to their opinions. Thankfully, that’s a small group.

We completely understand the specific nature of CKEditor. It’s a component which is used inside much bigger applications. Those who come for CKEditor don’t have much time to think about it (let alone contribute to it). They have much bigger projects to think about. They just want CKEditor to work, period.

But sincerely, we’ve always been fine with all that. We’ve found financial ways to make it happen and we were happy to create top quality software and make it available to everyone without asking for anything in return.

Moving to GPL only

Although we say that we’re fine with the current situation, we need to make changes:

• The market is getting more and more demanding when it comes to the quality, infrastructure and services of Open Source Software.
• Open Source is now seen as professional quality software.
• The balance between those who finance the project and those who enjoy it for free must be fairer.
• CKSource, being the only maintainer of CKEditor, must strive and be successful. It must have resources to maintain its large team and to keep investing so the quality of CKEditor keeps up with the market expectations.

Taking all the above into consideration, the GPL (version 2 or later) seems to be our best option:

• It allows for the most important part of Open Source in our case: the code stays easy to inspect and fix.
• It’ll keep it compatible with projects that adopt GPL believing in its “everyone should be free” ideology, like Drupal, TYPO3 and Neos.
• By offering in parallel a commercial license, we underline that there’s a serious company behind it and that giving back is really a part of it.

I can’t go with GPL!

There will always be the commercial license for CKEditor 5 available for you, if the GPL is not an option, which we understand may not be in most of the cases.

So there’s no disaster with this change. It’s the same software, with the same quality. One would just have to pay for it and we believe that there’s no shame for being paid for the hard work we put into producing and maintaining the software.

More information about the commercial license options can be found on the CKEditor website.

What about CKEditor 4?

We decided that keeping CKEditor 4 on the current GPL+LGPL+MPL triple license is the best option we have. There are already way too many solutions out there that depend on it so a change on the license could be too drastic. That’s why we’re going GPL with CKEditor 5 only.