So what's the difference between Professional and Community?

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  1. #1

    So what's the difference between Professional and Community?

    Its been a little while since I've been back, but if this info is out there already please point me to it.

    What's the difference between the two versions on the download page? Will there be feature differences between the editions in the future, or does Professional just mean early access and latest code availability, and support?
  2. #2

    RE: So what's the difference between Professional and Community?

    Hi vulgrin,

    Thanks for the questions.

    Basically "the license" is the difference between the two editions.

    At a high level, the Professional Edition comes with a Commercial License and the ability to include the Toolkit in a closed-source (proprietary) product.

    The Community Edition grants a GPL 3.0 license, which does require "open-sourcing" your product with a GPL 3.0 license if you wish to include the Toolkit (or ExtJS) in a Project/Product and distribute or have external users/customers access the system (SaaS). Personal use or use internally within an organization/company does not require "making the source available", as long as the system/project/product is not distributed outside of, or accessed from outside of, your organization/company.

    More information is available on the licensing summary page, see http://www.ext.net/license/.

    Support subscriptions (various options) and SVN access will also be available to purchase with the Professional Edition.

    Both Editions contain the exact same feature set and will so for the foreseeable future.

    A detailed list comparing licensing, Edition features and online store will be available shortly.
    Geoffrey McGill
    Founder
  3. #3

    RE: So what's the difference between Professional and Community?

    Thanks for the info.

    Will the Community Edition provide source code or is that just for these first alpha releases? I know you are wrapping up the grid changes for the next release and those are on a private SVN correct? Why not allow SVN readonly access for those community users who want to a) stay on the bleeding edge, even if the designers aren't fully tested and / or b) want to help write and submit code?

    Reason being, is if the license is GPL already, then you might benefit from the increased horsepower of the community to advance the codebase.

    Just a thought.
  4. #4

    RE: So what's the difference between Professional and Community?

    Thanks for the comments.

    > Will the Community Edition provide source code or is that just for these first alpha releases?

    The Coolite Toolkit is dual licensed (Profession & Community == Commercial & GPL 3.0). As part of the requirements for distributing GPL software, you must make the source code available. As long as there is a Coolite Toolkit Community Edition, the source code for that release will be available to download at the same time. This is our commitment to the Coolite community and the open-source community as a whole.

    > I know you are wrapping up the grid changes for the next release and those are on a private SVN correct?

    Correct. Our initial work on the GridPanel should be checked into SVN early next week. I plan to release one (maybe two) more builds of 0.5.x (0.5.2 & 0.5.3), and then all other enhancements (including GridPanel) will be released with v0.6.

    > Why not allow SVN read-only access for those community users who want to a) stay on the bleeding edge,
    > even if the designers aren't fully tested and / or b) want to help write and submit code?


    The reason SVN access is not an available option for the Community Edition is mainly do to a logistical and technical problem. Let me elaborate...

    As per the recommendation of the GPL 3.0 License, each Coolite .cs file is stamped with the proper GPL License Notification and Copyright statement. The Coolite Toolkit is developed and committed to SVN with the Profession Edition license notification and copyright statement. When we're ready to build a public release we trigger a build process which copies the project and replaces all the Professional Edition license and copyright statements with the Community Edition license and copyright statements.

    The Community Edition is effectively a snapshot of the current code base at the point of release.

    We can not make source code available to Community Edition users without stamping the files with the GPL license and copyright statements.

    Soooo, the build problem is...
    1. We would need two separate SVN repositories. One for Professional Edition, and one for Community Edition. Each file (.cs) in each Edition needs to be stamped with a unique license and copyright statement.
    2. Those two SVN repositories would need to be kept in sync. When a file is committed to ProfessionalSVN, the file would have to be copied and committed to CommunitySVN. The CommunitySVN would be read-only. No development would actually happen in the CommunitySVN. It would only be "kept sync'd" with the ProfessionalSVN.
    3. During the copy/commit/sync to CommunitySVN, the license and copyright statements at the top of each changed file would have to updated.
    Community Edition SVN access would be possible if I can solve the above problems. It's clearly in our best interest and would make a better product if Community SVN access was possible. Community SVN access is something I REALLY want to enable, but lack of time and specialized SVN skills are getting in the way.

    Either way, SVN access will only be available with support subscriptions and access would be read-only. No public (i.e. sans support subscription) will be available. We would love to accept direct community contributions, although because of potential licensing and/or copyright conflicts, we can not allow any public write access to SVN.

    We can grant write access to the SVN repository, and would love the help, but first we would need to sign an agreement.

    On a related note.... We're also looking to hire another core developer and another dedicated person to focus on support, documentation, samples and evangelism. If you, or someone you know, might be interested, please contact me (geoff [at] coolite [dot] com). Ninja skills with C#, asp.net webcontrols and JavaScript are required. ExtJS experience is obviously a major+. These would be remote "telecommute" positions.

    I hope this helps answer some of your questions.
    Geoffrey McGill
    Founder
  5. #5

    RE: So what's the difference between Professional and Community?

    Maybe I'm over simplifying the problem, but here are a couple solutions that I see:

    1. extract the license from the code. Change the code block to read something generic and legally written like: "See the LICENSE.TXT file for licensing information and restrictions.." Then publish one license.txt for the public version and one version for the commercial.

    2. if you have build scripts already that stamp the correct version on the files - then just automate those and provide a directory on the site for, say, the last month's worth of builds. I don't know how you have your builds set up, but if using something like MSBuild or Nant, then you could write a batch and set up a scheduled task to drop the zip into a folder on the server, then either write a quick asp.net page to read and display its contents in a web site friendly way. (as opposed to just opening up file list access)

    If you number your builds too - then when people submit patches they can refer to the specific build they patched. Although, generating true "patches" would be difficult since their code wouldn't be tied to a SVN repository.

    I'm sure there are other ways to handle this - this can't be a unique problem. I'll google around some more.
  6. #6

    RE: So what's the difference between Professional and Community?

    A good solution to this problem would be to adopt NAnt for the build process and a continuous integration engine as for instance CruiseControl. You can look at changes commited every night (for Nightly Builds :)) using CruiseControl and then execute NAnt scripts to upload the files in each repository (Comunity and Profesional) and stamp the licence and version numbers.
  7. #7

    RE: So what's the difference between Professional and Community?

    Yeah, definitely. Its been a few years since I've touched CC.net, but we were implementing it at a past job of mine and it seemed to go fairly well. (Though, it does require a "volunteer" to manage it when necessary.)

    The other advantage is that you can have it automatically run your unit tests too - and send out blame reports. :)
  8. #8

    RE: So what's the difference between Professional and Community?



    I would be willing to help the Coolite folks get CC.net and a nightly build process going (for FREE). I just set one up for my own development project and it works great. We use:

    Windows Server 2008
    IIS 7
    CC.net
    Trac
    Visual SVN

    You don't need Visual Studio installed on the server to compile it. Solution and project files are really just msbuild files (Microsoft's equivalent of NAnt). CC.net has msbuild support. I would be happy to provide you guys with the scripts I use so you can create a nightly build system.

    Just let me know if you're interested.
  9. #9

    RE: So what's the difference between Professional and Community?

    yes. geoff [at] coolite [dot] com

    lets talk shop.*


    Geoffrey McGill
    Founder
  10. #10

    RE: So what's the difference between Professional and Community?



    Just sent you an e-mail. Happy to help!
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