[AdleyEskridge]

This looks fantastic. I genuinely got giddy watching the screencast!

If I were to use Meteor for a partially closed source app earning around $1000 per month, how much could I expect to pay you? From the FAQ:

> If the GPL doesn't work for your project, get in touch ([e-mail]) and we will write you a commercial license to your specifications.

[zavulon]

I love everything about Meteor so far, except for this.

This is no way to answer such an important question that most potential users will have - let's face it, there's a lot of people who will want to use this for open source, but a lot more who will want to use this for commercial apps. To ensure Meteor's wide-spread acceptance, you need to clearly answer this question on FAQ page, and not with "we need to have a conversation".

[dspillett]

A great many things are sold this way, and it is sometimes unavoidable. Commercial projects tend to have a wide range of requirements from a licensing point of view so if they spent time drawing up a full commercial license they would end up having to rearrange half or more of it for the first commercial client that came along anyway. They could spend time drawing up many license templates (world wide, X,000 users, X server, ...) and pricing plans with many combinations of support and development agreements to try cover the bases - or they could spend more time coding.

Their preference is that the library be used under the GPL. That is their choice and it is a fair enough choice. But they also acknowledge that some entities can't accept that for one reason or another, and are willing to be flexible. Very flexible: instead of saying "this is our commercial license, deal with it" they have said "tell us what you need, and we'll see what we can do".

[zavulon]

Fair enough - if that's their choice, that's totally understandable. But my point is - if they wish to make it a wide-spread popular platform for web development, this is not the way to go about it. An MIT license like Rails would be a much better choice.

[olalonde]

How is your application distributed? If it's a web app that you run on your own servers, GPL doesn't apply to you (only AGPL would).

[ig1]

That part of the GPL faq refers to server side code, not client side code. Client side code very clearly gets distributed to third parties.

[zmmmmm]

Ugh, I didn't even consider that a (partly) client side framework would have been GPL. Unless they come out with a very clear, simple and friendly commercial license it pretty much kills meteor for all practical purposes.

(To be clear, it's not that I begrudge the author's their right to license it how they want. I simply think frameworks like this are too central and important to have any uncertainty about licensing associated with them.)