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.

[joeaudette]

@fredck glad to hear you guys are thinking of a solution for other OS projects and look forward to the clarification on your site. I'm not a lawyer myself so not completely sure of the legal ramifications, but I am skeptical about the idea that you can license it differently to other open source projects.

Lets say my project meets the requirements stated. Your license would allow me to distribute ckeditor5 with my OS software without imposing gpl copyleft on my software, but doesn't the main gpl license still apply to consumers of my software packages, who may build things on top of my project that includes non OS code of their own? Would they not be in violation?

[wwalc]

I am skeptical about the idea that you can license it differently to other open source projects.

This is possible, just like we can issue a commercial license for commercial customers, as copyright holders.

Your license would allow me to distribute ckeditor5 with my OS software without imposing gpl copyleft on my software, but doesn't the main gpl license still apply to consumers of my software packages, who may build things on top of my project that includes non OS code of their own? Would they not be in violation?

Nope, the GPL license restrictions will not apply to consumers of your software, that's the goal after all with allowing CKEditor to be included in OS applications licensed under different terms. As @fredck wrote we need to work on it further, but I believe we have a good solution for the problem raised here.

[Downchuck]

CKEditor developers are looking for some reasonable recompense given the vast usage of CKEditor by penurious corporations and developers: Given that the issue here is money, is there room or interest in a bountysource/indiegogo campaign for CKEditor 5 to be released back into a non-viral license?

The viral license is quite restrictive for UI Web components -- we all know that -- and this a long standing core component, one which we'd all hope does not have to see a fork from its earlier multi-licensed branch. As an individual developer who has burned a hundred grand of his own capital (don't worry, I've burned other people's money too), I very much sympathize with the CKEditor developers in their desire to see some return on their investment. Best of luck to all parties!

[mabar]

@fredck Glad to hear that! I cannot force users of my open source software to pay for part of the system or force them to use GPL license.
But I can surely add your logo with link as watermark at bottom of editor if you will agree that we can use eg. CPAL for our MPL / MIT / Apache licensed software.

[dtwist]

Even if it may be mostly psychological, I expect the monthly licensing model may prove a barrier to adoption for a lot of solo developers and small teams. Aside from this direct issue, there's a more pernicious knock-on effect as it leads to a loss of mind-share for CKE in general, when such developers move on to join larger teams and take the experience of using whatever else they've become familiar with to their new roles instead of CKE.

As an example, say someone is looking to use an RTE in a bootstrapped commercial project. It might take 6 months to a year to develop, and another year to get to 50 users. With the current CKE5 pricing model, they'd need a license from day one of development. This can be a non-starter for someone who is unsure of the success they'll see in the market.

Offering a free license for maybe five or ten users/month would allow aspirational developers to develop their apps and get to a small base of users (when they start to breathe easier about having external costs) without the overhead of a monthly license from the outset. Essentially, this would defer the decision to pay a license fee to a later date, when the worry of whether or not their project will succeed has been mitigated.

[demkinmaxim]

I run commercial software - website building platform, and we use Froala. We use commercial license. It is 900$ perpetual license with 1 year of updates. If I want - I can pay for another year of updates. And it is not problem.
But you ask for 1000$ per month for up to 1000 users!
Many SaaS companies has trial model. And if I have 100 000 trial users, and 10 000 paying users... I could not event imagine how much you will charge for that - 10 000$ / month? Just for a text editor?

[fredck]

@demkinmaxim, the online offer takes into consideration a group of use cases. The reason we have an option to "Contact us" is exactly to allow us to better understand your specific situation and come with a solution that fits your expectations. So please don't take misleading conclusions and feel invited to contact us.

Just for a text editor?

That's a very important point, btw. Please don't underestimate the importance of the text editor. As a creator of a website building platform, I'm sure that you understand that the text editor has an important role in your application. We've seen countless solutions where the attention to this important part is not appropriate and the results are disappointing.

But of course, feel free to go with the option that fits your requirements better and I'm not here in any way trying to undermine other editors. From our side, we can just promise you that we're doing our best so CKEditor is not "just a text editor" ;)

[jtraulle]

I do not really understand.

As long as there is no distribution of binaries, there is no problem with using GPL libraries (or other code) in an otherwise closed-source project.

As far as the regular GPL and LGPL are concerned, providing access to use a software over a network (like in SaaS or websites) is not considered distribution. This means that there is no problem with using (L)GPL libraries in a closed-source SaaS project.

I think most of uses of CKEditor happens on SaaS software or websites and these use cases are not considered distribution. So I do not really understand the change of licensing but maybe my interpretation of the GPL v2 is wrong ...

[fredck]

@jtraulle
You're right on bringing this question here. We thought about that as well, when deciding for the GPL. In fact, to avoid the doubt, we even wanted to go with the AGPL license instead, but this would make the editor incompatible with OSS under the GPL v2 license.

The fact is that it seems to be no final word and consensus about the legality of mixing GPL into software that is made available as websites/SaaS. There are those bringing interpretations to allow for it (usually GPL software consumers) and those bringing arguments against it (usually GPL software producers).

As situations like this bring doubt, when analyzing the legality of a specific case, there will be a strong emphasis on understanding what are the intentions of the copyright owner (licensor). In our case, as explained in this issue, there is a clear intention, and I confirm it, of allowing CKEditor under the GPL license only within software that is also GPL, no matter which way such software is made available for end users.

Another important aspect to consider is that CKEditor is a "component". It is not a complete software that can be delivered as a website, like a CMS for example.

Let's take Drupal and WordPress as examples. These are GPL software and you create websites with them. You're not integrating Drupal/WP into anything else when delivering such websites so there is no doubt whether you can integrate it with... well... with what?

Take CKEditor now. One will be always assembling it inside another software and then delivery the resulting product into a server making it available as a website. For that to happen, that another software must be GPL as well.

The above are examples of different kinds of GPL software and the legal interpretation must almost certainly be different for each of them.

Anyway, summarizing, we could start a long thread of discussions about this topic, manipulating words from license terms to justify opposite argumentations (I'm not saying that you're doing so). But at the end of the day, our intentions as licensors are decisive to solve any doubt and I hope to have them clarified with this comment.

[jtraulle]

@fredck Thanks for taking the time to clarify. I really do not want to undermine the work of all of you at CKSource. You really are doing an unbelievable work 🙂 and I understand that, as a company, you need to take care of financial resources.

I was truly excited by CKEditor 5 but with theses change of licensing, it is really a no go on my side. Even though I chose to publish my source code on an OSS license, I would certainly not choose GPL v2. Beside that, your commercial pricing scheme is clearly not accessible to indie developers (a monthly fee based on the number of end users 😲 )

From what you say, it seems indeed that the AGPL would be much more clear and not subject to any false interpretation. 😉

[AnnaTomanek]

@jtraulle, to quote @fredck on this, a few comments above:

(...) we want to support Open Source Software, just like we always did. Therefore, our plan is providing a free license for Open Source Software (...)

If you plan to release your project on an OSS license, we will be most happy to license CKEditor 5 for you for free. Please contact us to discuss it and we'll be glad to have you on board! This is already reflected on our pricing website, with the big "Free for Open Source" banner 🙂 Looking forward to hearing from you!

[jtraulle]

@AnnaTomanek Thanks for pointing that out. I am not ready right now but I keep that in mind for the near future 🙂

[mtilsted]

@jtraulle The gpl don't mention binary at all. It talks about "program", and the program in this case is ckeditor which is distributed to anyone who visit your website.

So any modifications to ckeditor, or plugins you write to ckeditor will also have to be released to all your users under gpl.

I am not sure how this affect the rest of the javascript on your page, but according to the authors of ckeditor "your entire application will have to be licensed under GPL as well" (if it interact with ckeditor)

[jtraulle]

I am not sure how this affect the rest of the javascript on your page, but according to the authors of ckeditor "your entire application will have to be licensed under GPL as well" (if it interact with ckeditor)
@mtilsted

Yeah, I continue to think that the GPL is not really appropriate because of the wide interpretation (especially regarding what is considered distribution ; this is because of this if AGPL is born : see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.en.html) . I'll stick with the 4.x branch for now and I'll see in the future if I am ready to switch under the licensing terms stated ... or consider other options 😉

[alvarotrigo]

@fredck you said:

Therefore, our plan is providing a free license for Open Source Software, as long as they meet a few conditions:

Did this change at all?
Right now I'm able to get the ckeditor.js file from a CDN or Github and use it in any open source project without having to prove anything to you guys?

[wwalc]

@alvarotrigo Yes, the change has been made. CKEditor 5 is now GPL, see https://ckeditor.com/legal/ckeditor-oss-license/

Please note that CKEditor 5 is still Open Source, just the license under which the editor is available has been limited to GPL. That's why you still see the editor on GitHub and in CDN ;) The fact that it's easily available online does not mean of course that one can freely use it without caring about anything. If you use CKEditor 5 you have to be sure you meet all the requirements of the GPL license (or purchase a commercial license),

Because of being GPL-licensed, CKEditor 5 will not fit out of the box other Open Source projects which are licensed under an incompatible license (e.g. it's impossible to mix a GPL-licensed software in a MIT-licensed project, without making the whole project GPL). Therefore we started the Free for Open Source initiative, where we grant a dedicated non-GPL license to projects that would like to use CKEditor 5 and are Open Source.

If you have any particular questions, please feel to contact us (https://ckeditor.com/contact).