Meteor is now MIT licensed

http://meteor.com/faq/how-is-meteor-licensed

by nim • 14 years ago

389 121 14 years ago

meteor.com

blhack• 14 years ago

I think we all sortof knew this was what it was going to be.

bmelton• 14 years ago

Honestly, I'm surprised.

You've got a team of cracker jack developers who introduce a product that, frankly, isn't ready for prime time by any sane person's definition with the goal of targeting the majority of developers (e.g., not the most experienced, and not the ones operating at the top end of scale), with no real mention of license?

I expected it to be a commercially licensed language, and honestly, was perfectly happy with that. This is of course better, but leaves me wondering just a little more what the business model is. Not that it's going to stop me toying with it -- I think Meteor is the best JS framework I've seen for ease of use.

andrelewis3• 14 years ago

I would suspect the business model will be support and feature development. In a widely used framework, there will always be people who need it customized, or need to integrate it in new and interesting ways, or require some sort of commercial support contract in order to use it. If they make these options available early on, they will make money.

cmelbye• 14 years ago

I was surprised as well. I got a little scared when I read their email announcement earlier this week where they talked about this license announcement. I fully expected it to be some sort of commercial license due to the lack of information given previously and the polish that even their prototype unfinished product had.

As for the business model, I could possibly see them doing hosting. Although there's no shortage of node.js hosts, they could fine tune their service to work well with the Meteor framework and integrate it in a way that a generic node.js host wouldn't be.

chrisrogers• 14 years ago

This is great to hear. This issue was one of my great qualms with the platform, and the biggest argument for creating a copycat platform. Now to address the auth/permissions!

debergalis2• 14 years ago

Thanks! auth is next. But check out the madewith.meteor.com source for a good example of how you can lock down an app today.

andrelewis3• 14 years ago

Just a random thought but perhaps you should put up a honeypot version on it's own server to see where the weak spots in security are. Then invite the community to find the holes, or actually ask the hacking communities to help identify gaps in security? Honeypot in this instance meaning a machine dedicated to pulling in attacks (Like flies to honey) to help you identify weak areas of your framework.

architgupta2• 14 years ago

I think this is a great move. Longer term it'll be better for Meteor, the team and the community.

Ruby on Rails would be fine as an analogy here. The monetization model might be different from directly licensing and selling the framework, but these guys are smart, they'll figure it out.

I am quite impressed by this. The team listened to the feedback from the community. They weren't obligated to do so :-)

debergalis2• 14 years ago

We got some amazingly specific and valuable feedback -- check some of the Meteor HN threads. MIT is going to be a big part of making Meteor available everywhere.

architgupta2• 14 years ago

Doing that now. That gets me thinking. I'll deploy a weekend app with meteor.

Lazare2• 14 years ago

When Meteor first launched, I was one of the very very many people who said that Meteor looked amazing, but was afraid that their license would hamper adoption.

With the change in license, I think the only major hurdle has been removed. The fundamental idea is good, their current execution is extremely slick, and their immediate plans[1] look achievable. I have very high hopes for the project.

If you haven't checked out Meteor yet, at least watch the screencast: http://meteor.com/screencast

[1]: I originally said roadmap; as mcrider rightly points out Meteor does not have one. There is some info floating around about current development goals (notably related to adding authentication), which is what I was thinking of.

mcrider• 14 years ago

What roadmap? The FAQ says there isn't one.

Edit: I figured that's what you meant, I was just curious if you had seen an official roadmap. I guess they are too fresh to have one and are waiting for more community input before formalizing their goals -- Which is fine by me.

muyuu4• 14 years ago

GPL was perfectly fine for a product like Meteor.

Unless you plan to modify Meteor, ship your version and not share your changes, there are very few things you can do to violate the GPL by using Meteor.

Meteor is neither a library nor boilerplate code to add upon. Lots of folks seem to be "hating" on GPL for no good reason, except maybe not knowing it (which is a good reason but it's hardly justifiable at this point).

ig12• 14 years ago

No.

If you use a GPL library all of your code has to be released under a GPL compatible licence. The Meteor framework counts as a library due to the way it interacts with your code.

You might be confusing it with the Lesser GPL which allows library code to be incorporated into propriety software (or websites in this case).

To understand the difference between the two you should read: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

Egregore• 14 years ago

Some products offered under GPL license require you to publish your code if you use it as a library.(ExtJs was one example of this) So MIT license for Meteor will help wider adoption.

mwill• 14 years ago

Maybe I'm just not the audience for Meteor, because while it looks like a great project but as a nodejs guy, the fact that it hides itself away from the platform and turned away from the fantastic npm makes me sort of weary about it as a whole.

But I imagine people coming from rails or whatever don't find this a problem at all.

andrelewis3• 14 years ago

Agreed, why keep reinventing the wheel?

tbergeron• 14 years ago

I thought exactly the same, I really like the reactive programming principles they've brought. But without npm it's useless.

bricestacey• 14 years ago

Agreed. For this very reason, after watching the Meteor screencast, I immediately looked into alternatives such as derby.

simplify• 14 years ago

SocketStream is a nice framework (also in early stages) that embraces npm and other node conventions. It doesn't support reactive programming out of the box, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone decides to build a module for it.

owenb• 14 years ago

Hi simplify. I'll be releasing an new version of SocketStream this Sunday which allows developers to do just that.

The new Request Responder API will allow developers to experiment with many different approaches to models, model synching (e.g. with Backbone.js and Ember.js) and reactive templating.

Rather than put opinionated choices about models and clients-side frameworks into the core, we'll ensure the best third-party modules are fully documented and supported before featuring them on our website.

nateps• 14 years ago

Personally, I agree that sticking with npm is the best solution. We have managed to do this with Derby (http://derbyjs.com/) while still providing easy app creation, automatic packaging, realtime data syncing, and reactive model-view bindings.

It's awesome to see that Meteor is now permissively licensed, but I would prefer to see them embrace npm as well.

foolinator2• 14 years ago

I don't mind it if it hides away from a platform.

After all, that's the point of an API - to hide the dirty details.

I mean, I've not touched assembly code in over 10 years. I've not touched C++ in 10. This is a good thing, but I do remember saying the same thing about Java about hiding memory details. Now none of these languages require heavy memory management and hide nearly all those dirty details.

It doesn't seem like meteor is ready for prime time, but it is impressive (like RoR or roo) how you can make a site in less than 10 minutes.

zobzu• 14 years ago

Cool I can now use this in my closed source project without ever giving any change back! Hate this GPL that requires you to give back anything if you let others get your product.

techiferous2• 14 years ago

GPL requires you to give back; MIT gives you the choice. Developers are by nature creative people. And humans are not incapable of altruism. Even with an MIT license, I expect a lot of community contributions to pour in.

In fact, I expect more community contributions to come in. MIT means (perhaps) a lower percentage of users will give back, but there will be a higher absolute number of users since the license is more permissive.

getsat• 14 years ago

http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/233753/gpl-copy...

Permissive licenses are just fine (arguably, better).

Sanddancer2• 14 years ago

Until you want to use some CDDL-licensed code. Or some APSL code, or one of the many other mutually incompatible viral licenses out there. Especially in something like a web framework, where most of the clauses of the GPL wouldn't apply anyway. License dickwaving makes the community a worse place. Stop doing it, sit down, and code something.

callumjones• 14 years ago

Maybe you should check out other MIT licensed frameworks and assess whether they have fostered a closed or open community.

Rails is MIT licensed and as a result we have seen a lot of companies build their web applications on Rails and build very successful businesses, but we have also seen a range of opens source plugins/gems and applications themselves built around Rails which have resulted in a better web community.

This is 2012, developers who care about something like Meteor also care enough about open source to give back. We don't want developers to be forced to make their products open source, they should feel compelled by the enjoy of helping others.

wavephorm3• 14 years ago

I think they should've tried to commercialize it. There is a real lack of good, new development systems these days. If you completely open source a new system, developers will just rip it off, contribute nothing, and it will go nowhere. So where's the incentive to continue making it better?

Developers need to wake up, and realize that new, and substantially better systems can be built if they are willing to pay for them. Unfortunately the FOSS community has burned into developers' consciousness to never pay for anything, ever, which produces and environment of extreme lack of innovation.

Our development tools completely fucking suck precisely because developers are no longer willing to buy quality development tools.

tikhonj3• 14 years ago

I think that's demonstrably false given how good development tools actually are, particularly open source ones. If anything, too much work goes into open source development tools--certainly much more than in any other category!

Just look at how much is accomplished--and how is easily--by various start-ups using open source technology. There are great web servers, web frameworks, libraries, programming languages, text editors and all sorts of other stuff (that I don't use much so can't comment on).

Also, plenty of people contribute to (popular) open source libraries and frameworks. Even less popular projects get a good amount of contribution--I'm following a couple of emacs modes (a fork of JS-2 and Haskell-mode) as well as some tools (like DoctorJS) on GitHub and all of these get pull requests surprisingly often. I suspect the ratio of contributors to users is pretty high.

In short, open source as a model works if your only goal is quality software. Making a framework open source is a good course of action and we should encourage it.

wavephorm3• 14 years ago

  I think that's demonstrably false given how good development tools actually are

No. Development tools seriously suck. Show me an IDE that can debug multi-client websocket code. Good luck. Every open source IDE's like Eclipse are useless these days because they can no longer keep up with the new problems being introduced.

Light Table is maybe the first genuinely new, commercial, development environment to be introduced. People are gushing over the possibilities. All of a sudden people might, for the first time in 15 years, be willing to pay real money to make their lives easier.

The open source model is a socialist model that has failed to keep up with the pace of technological change, and encourages developers to not purchase development tools which slows innovation in development technologies. FOSS ultimately holds back innovation.

stcredzero• 14 years ago

I think that's demonstrably false given how good development tools actually are, particularly open source ones

I'm curious about your specific frame of reference. Which tools do you have in mind? Have you also used Visual Studio, C#, and Linq as a point of comparison? (I have not, but they are mentioned favorably in these comments.)

A lot of people might cite Eclipse as a good development tool. The Java GUI library used to implement it was much lauded as well. However, it was not so much Open Source that drove its quality as the willingness of IBM to commoditize Java and Java development environments out from under Sun.

GCC was a going concern, but a lot of its development was funded by commercial firms that wanted fixes or extensions. Chromium and Firefox have certainly benefitted from outside funding.

From what I've seen, FOSS can often produce good back-end software but user-facing stuff is often lacking in a certain polish, unless there is commercial backing and paid professionals are contributors.

I've also read that the majority of FOSS projects become stagnant. I think of them as startups but for a different system of compensation. That's not good or bad. That's just the reality of how these things work.

techiferous2• 14 years ago

As a Rails developer, your comment baffles me. We are practically drowning in open-source Ruby gems, many that are very useful and of high quality.

> If you completely open source a new system, developers will just rip it off, contribute nothing, and it will go nowhere. So where's the incentive to continue making it better?

The exact opposite of what you described happened with Ruby on Rails.

drewrv• 14 years ago

I do .net at my day job and it's awesome. Visual studio, c#, linq, etc are great when someone else is paying the costs.

But for my own startup, the costs just aren't worth it. Open source frameworks are good enough and good enough is what matters on a budget.

mattbriggs3• 14 years ago

there is a huge difference between platforms and IDEs

Lazare2• 14 years ago

This.

I do a fair bit of development of Django using PyCharm. Django is BSD licensed; PyCharm is closed-source. Both are, in my view, amazing tools.

Open source platforms are overwhelmingly dominant, awesome, and (at least for web frameworks) licensed as BSD/MIT or equivalent. Open source IDEs are uh... ...let's just say they're an acquired taste, and leave it at that.

Since we're talking about Meteor, the proper comparison appears to be platforms; as a result I have to say wavephorm is full of it. If he's trying to argue that Eclipse is terrible...well, he's right, but he's on the wrong thread. ;)

pbreit2• 14 years ago

The is _nothing_ stopping them from commercializing it.

clavalle• 14 years ago

Fantastic!

I think the sky is the limit with this framework.

If these guys can stick to the spirit of the project, add what can truly help push the system forward while ignoring the multitudes of one offs that will try to chip away the utility, this really has a shot of not only being a game changer but helping define the game for years to come.

Great work!

zmmmmm• 14 years ago

Awesome - I was one of those highly critical of the original license, so let me be among the first in congratulating them on making this (quite major) change so quickly.

koko775• 14 years ago

I was also critical, and agreed, this is a fantastic change!

jamesmanning• 14 years ago

What's up with all the trolls on this thread?

richcollins• 14 years ago

While reactivity is an interesting idea and possible incremental improvement, the huge win is in saving us from building UI. Why aren't there more frameworks like Cappuccino but with built in bindings to the DB?

pixie_• 14 years ago

is there an open source license that says says free to use for people etc.. but if you have a company larger than x then you must support the project with $$$ ?

mmahemoff• 14 years ago

Anything's possible, but caution advised to anyone who tries this. It's not always apparent to open-source developers how much pain custom or obscure licenses cause in big organisations (ie the kind of paying customers in your proposal).

Even if it's just a normal license with a single clause variation, it becomes a different license from a tracking perspective. A lot of companies have standard policies on open-source and anything not following one of several popular licenses might be forbidden or require a drawn-out review process at best. This gets even more complicated when you consider packages might not be directly used, but be part of a dependency chain where you have to map out the whole graph in order to demonstrate compliance.

tikhonj3• 14 years ago

I don't know of any projects that do exactly this, but there are projects that are dual-licensed. You can either use the code under the GPL or buy a commercial license and use it in your proprietary code.

ExtJS is a great example of this sort of dual-licensing, and I've seen it on other projects as well.

SeanLuke• 14 years ago

Let's hope there's nothing patentable in that project.

heretohelp2• 14 years ago

More importantly, how do I keep clients from fucking up my database? How is security being done?

Seriously, if I'm not capable of baking limitations into data persistence/logic at the server level then this entire framework is worthless except for building up a portfolio of cute demos that can't be used for any real work.

dmix• 14 years ago

As this question comes up every single time Meteor or Firebase is brought up, I think its fair to say that "we're working on it" wasn't and isn't a good enough answer.

hbbio• 14 years ago

You should also have a quick look there: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3858838

analog• 14 years ago

From their newsletter which just went out, can't find a link online.

"Please make sure it's reasonably secure. Meteor security isn't as hard as people think. Admittedly it doesn't yet have the delicious "candy coating" that the database and DOM update stuff has, but we didn't, like, forget to put any in. Here's what Made With does:

* Use Meteor.publish() and Meteor.subscribe() to control what clients can see (remove the 'autopublish' package first). Actually you may not need to do this for a blog.

* Use Meteor.methods() and Meteor.call() to define secure server functions and call them from the client. Then lock down your app by disabling the "training wheel" methods that let any client do any write."

Also from a quick skim of the server code itself it looks like they are using connect, so you it's possible that you could roll something up using a connect middleware package like everyauth. [1]

That would mean hosting your own server though rather than using the simple meteor deploy.

[1] http://everyauth.com/

heretohelp2• 14 years ago

>* Use Meteor.publish() and Meteor.subscribe() to control what clients can see (remove the 'autopublish' package first). Actually you may not need to do this for a blog.

Scoping isn't enough.

>* Use Meteor.methods() and Meteor.call() to define secure server functions and call them from the client. Then lock down your app by disabling the "training wheel" methods that let any client do any write."

So, I can't make a production-grade app unless I use 0% of the magic.

tjogin• 14 years ago

Reading the documentation would be good start.

guelo3• 14 years ago

I feel it is sad that so few HN hackers seem to appreciate the vision of the GPL. GPL needs more indispensable software like this for it to thrive and protect us all from a future of completely locked down computers.

coderdude• 14 years ago

I'm open to a compelling argument for why the GPL is better than a license that basically says "you can do whatever you want with this." (From the perspective of deterring the locking down of computers by corporations.)

guelo3• 14 years ago

If it isn't obvious, GPL is an attack against proprietary computers and against the corporations that have been trying repeatedly over decades to bottle-up and monopolize the computer revolution.

jasonkester• 14 years ago

Please not here though.

By all means fire up a new thread and I'm sure you guys will wrap this up in no time. But for the sake of the rest of us here to discuss the topic we're discussing, please don't drop a little religious war into the middle of it.

no_gravity• 14 years ago

GPL 3 has a clause forbidding the use of GPL 3 licensed code on locked down computers. Googling for "anti tivo clause" will bring up a lot of discussion about it.

geon2• 14 years ago

From a user perspective, GPL offers in theory more freedom, since new products built on codebase X will also be free.

It is debatable if this is true in practice. If less software gets built as a result of the license restriction, the GPL takes away freedom. Even closed source software adds some freedom - the freedom of choice.

From a developer perspective, there is no question which one is more free. We often do not have the choice to release our software as open source, and when we do, an invasive license like the GPL is still a headache. If I can pick up a library or framework and just use it, that's the one I will pick.

vasco2• 14 years ago

I agree with you, but just to point out what I believe the GPL people think about your point: If you're going to write non-GPL'ed code, they would prefer you wouldn't even write the code, Stallman has said this many times. I think they equate this to something along the lines of just creating more "prisons" and just because you have a bunch of "prisons" to choose where to spend your life, it doesn't make you more free

stoolpigeon• 14 years ago

I would say there is a question from a developer perspective. The idea that more choice is better and makes one more free is a cultural one and not an objective fact. There is a point where one has too many choices and they become a real encumbrance. I think Barry Schwarz has done a good job of describing this phenomenon.

I think Vasco is also brings up another valid argument. Not all choices are equal and some are not even actually choices. Either way you want to look at it, one can honestly make a sensible and consistent argument that more software does not automatically mean more freedom.

pornel2• 14 years ago

"GPL takes away freedom" is a very developer-centric point of view. From user point of view GPL gives freedoms that MIT/BSD don't give.

Where freedoms of developers and users conflict, GPL sides with users.

In other words, GPL only takes away your freedom to take freedom away from others. If you don't intend to restrict others' freedoms, GPL shouldn't get in your way.

mike-cardwell• 14 years ago

I license code under the GPL. If I write something and release it open source, I'm doing you a favour by letting you use it for free. If you make changes and distribute them, the least you can do is return the favour and give them back. If you're not happy with that arrangement, you're free to not use my code.

I wouldn't be happy if I spent a lot of time writing some open source software and then a company came along, improved on it, and distributed it in their closed, proprietary software. That's why I prefer the GPL over the MIT license.

some1else• 14 years ago

Freedom of choice is inherent and not relevant to the subject.

I chose not to go to an Irish pub to watch the game between Barcelona and Madrid tonight just as I chose to investigate Derby instead of Meteor because of its previous licensing policy. We can agree that the existence of the Irish pub increased my number of possible choices, but it didn't extend my freedom of action.

I had the _option_ of going to an Irish pub, but I had the _freedom_ of smoking a cigarette at the terrace I chose to go to.

jwr• 14 years ago

GPL restricts the pool of potential collaborators.

Also, GPL has served its purpose: these days 1) almost everyone realizes that it is in everyone's interest to share code and contribute back (maintaining private forks is expensive in the long term), and 2) most software is offered as a service and the value is not just in the software, but also in the infrastructure, maintenance, support, etc, meaning you rarely encounter the problem of restricted liberties because of a software license.

Note that you do not need a copyleft license to support sharing.

sciurus• 14 years ago

In web development, perhaps. In embedded systems (including the huge world of consumer electronics like cellphones) I suspect that if the linux kernel wasn't copyleft there would be few corporate contributions to its public codebase.

njharman• 14 years ago

It enforces the pool of potential collaborators.

I value my work, it is not free. Either pay for it or agree to contribute your improvements.

WiseWeasel• 14 years ago

Most websites are commercial, and they operate in competitive spaces. They will not consider using GPL code if it means their own site code becomes GPL-licensed.

GPL works when the people using it must contribute whatever small patches or modifications they have made, not when they have to turn over multi-million-dollar codebases worth much more (commercially) than the GPL tool in question.

Sanddancer2• 14 years ago

This would be true if it were an area where Open software didn't already dominate. As others, including the developers of Metor, have stated, this software being GPLed was detrimental to the overall user base because there were many people who were not willing to use and contribute to software with a restrictive copyright. The existing culture of web development is already centered around permissive licenses, trying to introduce a new product with more onerous usage conditions now will just lead to it languishing because its usage of the GPL is a weakness.

sharjeel• 14 years ago

[Checked] Fix License [TODO] DB Security/Authorization

geoffschmidt• 14 years ago

Yep, that's what's on the whiteboard :)

meta8609• 14 years ago

Why is this framework better than things like ember.js, especially if ember has something like this https://github.com/tchak/colors-demo

htilford• 14 years ago

I don't think 'better' is the right question. Their's room for multiple frameworks. To answer the question I think Meteor's strong suit is live coding for rapid prototyping.

olov• 14 years ago

That is very generous. I hope that this is a win-win situation for the ecosystem and their business.

Estragon• 14 years ago

I'm curious about what the new business model is going to be.

js4all• 14 years ago

This is awesome news. There are currently 3 competing frameworks: Meteor, Firebase and Derby, all discussed on HN last week. I guess the new license gives Meteor a big plus.

I am glad they changed their minds.

ashleyw• 14 years ago

Oh, wow! I'd been working on what appears to be a Meteor-like framework with the very premise of "All the same APIs are available on the client and the server — including database APIs!" for the past few days. It came from my frustration of having to duplicate JS code on both the server and client which just seems stupid when you can provide the same API but with different end-points for each side (i.e. client -> API, server -> DB.)

haraball• 14 years ago

It would be interesting to see some statistics before and after this announcement, even if it's still a young framework.

NanoWar• 14 years ago

(whoa the background needs a <fixed> attribute...)

soapdog• 14 years ago

Isn't it a security risk to allow arbitrary mongodb (or minimongodb) commands in the client side? In their demo, they show a client deleting data from a js console. If that is possible, what prevents an evil user from doing the same to my deployed meteor app?

Meteor is now MIT licensed

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