I guess you have to make your whole frontend open source if you use their editor under that license? I'm not sure how GPL interacts with scripting languages. Do you have to run GPL scripts on a GPL'd interpreter for it to be permissible?

Regardless, the pricing for their commercial offering seems really intense. $29/mo for 25 MAU? I feel like they're missing a few zeroes there. Maybe they meant 2,500 MAU? 25,000 MAU? The demo I played with makes it clear that the editor component is rather nice, but I would rather look at alternatives at that price. I would imagine the collaborative nature is what influences the price, but somehow Google Docs and MS Office do fine with collaboration as a core product feature without charging >$1/MAU just for that feature.

I suspect the difference is that Google Docs and MS Office don't integrate seamlessly into your front-end product and provide your users with a collaborative editing experience. They would have to know they're using Docs or Office (and if necessary, acquire their own account and maintain their own license in good standing, whatever that entails. Either way, the users' data is ultimately to whatever extent locked up in that solution, and not in your product.)

It makes sense to me, that you can use their flagship editor product and advertise for CKeditor, as long as you're publishing your work under the same copyleft license so they don't need to feel like you've taken advantage of them for a commercial endeavor.

Under a GPL license, nothing is preventing you from charging your users, but also it is probably generally expected that nothing is preventing the users from borrowing your source code, then standing up their own instance of the tool and maintaining it in-house, either.

In this way, it makes sense. You can either pay CKeditor for their work when you integrate it ... or, for no money, you can commit to not use the editor to hold your users and their data hostage.

(I'm over-dramatizing a bit, but also not. People regularly talk about freeing themselves from their Google Mail hostage situations, especially on HN.)

Maybe $29/mo is a lot for 25 monthly active users when you're operating a business at web scale, but it's really not a lot of money for a company with 25 employees who has maybe built their own bespoke in-house collaborative solution, and managed to do it using CKeditor instead of rolling their own editor or cobbling one together from other free components. I don't know if that's the target market, but that's certainly the base case, if your start-up company is "dogfooding" its own solutions.

If your users are not worth $1/mo + your other overhead costs, then maybe they don't need to get real-time collaborative editing? (Or maybe it doesn't need to come from your solution...)

Yes, that's what I was thinking too. It doesn't make much sense to couple your product at those prices.

CKEditor 5 is cool and all, but $1 USD per month per user is in our case way more expensive than our cloud infrastructure.

First of all, thank you so much for the feedback. The 25 end user plan is a specific offering for small projects (no zeros missing:)) please don’t forget that the fee covers as well the support allowance, enterprise warranties, indemnifications, etc.

In our flexible plan, we always try to find a working licensing scenario with our customers, with volume discounts, especially for bigger projects. Also, note that MAU count is not the only licensing metric that’s offered, and we are happy to simply sit down with you, discuss your project and reach an agreement.

> I'm not sure how GPL interacts with scripting languages. Do you have to run GPL scripts on a GPL'd interpreter for it to be permissible?

Somewhat related (Common Lisp is typically compiled) I found the "Lisp LGPL" / LLGPL license to be a clear way of resolving the inherent C-bias of the GPL license suite. It's essentially just the LGPL but with this preamble that defines valid/invalid forms of proprietary software "linking" with an LLGPL library: http://opensource.franz.com/preamble.html Of note is a fun instance of the open/closed principle -- your subclasses of a library's class are yours but modifications to the base class trigger the LGPL licensing hook for your application.

I would assume that if you're serving Ckeditor in your webapp, the GPL would apply and your whole webapp needs to be GPL'd.

Given they had other license options for version 4 (https://ckeditor.com/legal/ckeditor-oss-license/), I suspect they might just use the GPL only option for 5 to try and drive sales. Good luck to them, lots of companies are using Quill (BSD) instead.

> the pricing for their commercial offering seems really intense. $29/mo for 25 MAU?

The page doesn't seem to imply that the price for 25+ users would scale linearly; for that they have a "Contact Us" call to action for negotiating pricing.

25 MAU seems reasonable to me for the following use-case: Company A sells a custom CMS to Company B, with a CKEditor-powered admin area to be used by <25 of Company B's content writing staff.

>The page doesn't seem to imply that the price for 25+ users would scale linearly; for that they have a "Contact Us" call to action for negotiating pricing.

I confirm that! It is just a specific offering for a small project where 25 people team use our editor. It's a fair price (covers granting the commercial license, the right to use / change / hide our code, enterprise support, maintenance, warranties, indemnifications, etc). For bigger projects we always try to implement a licensing scenario that works well for a given customer. Contact us and we will do our best to craft you an optimal plan.

It might be worthwhile putting some bracketing or aspirational pricing up there with it too then as you’re potentially scaring away potential commercial clients who look at that price and can’t see how they could justify its inclusion at a prices they would have to guess at using that as a base.

Here's an explanation: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html

Thanks, I can Google too, but I was asking for a simple explanation of the license.

Do you mean you aren't sure of GPL2 (the plus just means they reserve the right to change any contributed code to GPL3 or above with out getting a new license agreement from the contributer) or that you aren't sure how that interacts with a web app?

In this case, essentially all your front end code would need to be GPL2+ as well (GNU considers dynamic linking to count for GPL purposes I have a hard time imagining you could sufficiently separate the CKE code from the rest of your code/site to satisfy them). If CKE requires any server side code your back end code technically would need to be GPLed as well but you'd never have to share it (back end code is generally considered to not be distributed hence the AGPL) so it would have no real effect and no one would know if you didn't.

GPL 2+ just means you can redistribute the code under any version of the GPL from 2 or following. Your choice. At the moment there are only GPL 2 and GPL 3 but if there's ever a GPL 4 etc. those would be acceptable too.

Practically speaking, it also means that if you want to contribute code back to this code base, you would have to license your code in the same way, allowing redistribution under all GPL versions 2 and up.