Why not an open source license?

Question

yEd looks like great software! I would love to use it for my personnal use and in our work place (koumbit.org, a non-profit dedicated to free software and helping other non-profits with technology), but unfortunately, the license of yEd is too restrictive for us. We are worried that the license may not allow us to freely use the software for multiple users and thus threaten the perrenity of our documentation.

Furthermore, as a Debian developper, I would see yEd as a great addition to Debian, and therefore Ubuntu. However, the non-free (as in speech) license doesn't allow yEd to be shipped with other distributions.

I do not see the point in using that special license for this software: users are allowed to download and run the application anyways, why not provide the source code so that contributions from the community could be added to your program?

I also feel it's too bad that you make use of other free software but do not contribute your own back to the community.

Hoping you will make the right choice eventually, which could consist of having a dual license (current license and GPL-2 or similar)...

Answer 1

yEd makes heavy use of other closed-source software, most noticeable our yFiles for Java diagramming library and the JIDE docking framework. Selling yFiles for Java licenses is an important part of our business model, so we have no plans to open-sourcing it, and therefore, there is no way we can distribute yEd under an open-source license.

Comments

That's fair that it can't be open-source, but can we at least get Plug-in/Extension support in yEd? there are just too many feature requests from the users, and you don't seem to have the resources to implement them.

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Unfortunately "Plugin-Support" is also out of question for the free version of the product: This would be *exactly* the use-case that most of our customers have and this is what they *can* do now with a yFiles license; they can implement their own programs using our powerful APIs to automate processes and connect their very own "version of yEd" to third party systems, customize it to their own needs, etc. If we made a plugin API available for yEd, this plugin API would have to give access to our library and this is exactly what we cannot provide because the vast majority of our current customers suddenly would not be paying customers anymore, but rather just another free software user. A free version of yEd can only exist with these restrictions in place. If you are interested in a version of yEd that you *can* customize and program with, please contact our sales team.