Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by DonCullen 3527 days ago
I'm not someone who'd know enough to be able to discuss this in detail. But in the linked post, Kal Tol mentions "The WordPress GPL Rich Text component in question, is actually a wrapper around another Rich Text component named ZSSRichTextEditor which is licensed MIT. In retrospect it would have been easier to use it directly."

So it appears that although Wordpress is using GPL, the component that Wordpress based their wrapper on is using a MIT license; so it would seem there is a flexibility in being able to use either the GPL or MIT license.

What I'm basically seeing based on Kol's article is:

1. MIT created ZSSRichTextEditor, and distributed it using MIT license. (see: https://github.com/nnhubbard/ZSSRichTextEditor/blob/master/L...)

2. Wordpress then created a wrapper for ZSSRichTextEditor, and subsequently had it covered by GPL instead of MIT. (see: https://github.com/wordpress-mobile/WordPress-Editor-iOS/blo...)

3. Kol then took that stuff, implemented React, and re-applied MIT license to it, which whether intentional or not, was what the original license was.

That being said, it's all open source and in the public domain. There's no theft here if it's was freely distributed. Kol even took it one step further (as he should), and gave proper credit where due -- not only within the project, but on social media.
2 comments
snovv_crash 3527 days ago
MIT can be relicensed as GPL. GPL cannot be relicensed as MIT. If they wanted to use the wrapper, they should have released as GPL. I'd they didn't want to release as GPL they shouldn't have used GPL code. It is that simple.
link
douche 3527 days ago
Moral of the story: avoid GPL code, unless you really want to deal with headaches.
link
snovv_crash 3527 days ago
More like: Avoid GPLv2/3 code if you plan to keep your code proprietary and distribute binaries. Avoid GPL Affero if you want to keep your code proprietary and it can be reached over a network by clients. Use GPL if your code can also be GPLd or you aren't going to be distributing it/giving it network access to clients.
link
zizee 3527 days ago
I don't think your point 3 is correct. Wix did not re-apply the MIT to WP's code. Wix only applied the MIT license to their own wrapper code and pointed people the the license of the "dependencies" in their readme.

That said, I am not sure if you license a wrapper code of a GPL library as MIT? My gut says yes as you don't need to distribute the GPL'd code with your code, but I'd be happy to be enlightened.

link
revelation 3527 days ago
Of course you can, but that's pretty pointless. The moment someone tries to use the wrapper the wrapped GPL library must also be present, so then the whole thing becomes GPL.

The complaint isn't that the code in the repo isn't GPL, anyway. They released an app with GPLed code but have not released the source.

(There is one exception: if your wrapper just invokes a GPL program as you would on a shell, that's not considered a combined work. But anything else, static or dynamic linking, whatever, it pretty much immediately becomes GPL)

link
zizee 3527 days ago
> Of course you can, but that's pretty pointless. The moment someone tries to use the wrapper the wrapped GPL library must also be present, so then the whole thing becomes GPL.

It may be pointless (I don't agree), but I wasn't writing about whether there was a point to it, but whether it could or could not be done.

> The complaint isn't that the code in the repo isn't GPL, anyway.

Where did I say that was what the complaint was? I was just responding to parents comment as I thought it was incorrect. If you read my first comment on this story it was to point this out.

link