[DougHaber]

This article misses a point as to why the community was outraged at the license change from LGPL to GPL. I was testing switching an application to EXT JS at the time, and I was really liking it. The prototype worked so well that we were preparing to get the commercial license, and then the license change happened.

After the change was announced, a number of people said they would fork and maintain the LGPL versions. One of the people behind EXT JS showed up in online discussions at the time and insisted that would be a violation.

The problem came from it not really being under LGPL. They tacked on this extra piece:

  Ext is also licensed under the terms of the Open Source LGPL 3.0 license. You may use our open source license if you:

   * Want to use Ext in an open source project that precludes using non-open source software

   * Plan to use Ext in a personal, educational or non-profit manner

   * Are using Ext in a commercial application that is not a software development library or toolkit, you will
     meet LGPL requirements and you do not wish to support the project

There was some debate over this, since the GPL prohibits further restrictions in some cases, and a lot of people believed they could ignore those extra restrictions and treat it as true LGPL.

The EXT JS company in online forums insisted they were wrong, and further outraged the community. A lot of people, myself included, decided to stop using EXT JS. We were planning on the commercial license, but the response of the company didn't feel right, and so like many others, we abandoned EXT JS.