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Handling TinyMCE license change #4521
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Originally created by @ssddanbrown on GitHub (Mar 23, 2024).
In BookStack we use TinyMCE as the main WYSIWYG page editor (in addition to the newer description/comment editor boxes).
Starting with TinyMCE 7 they've changed their license from MIT to GPLv2+ (and it was LGPL before MIT). They also have a GitHub discussion for this here which I've commented on.
This puts us in an awkward place, since GPLv2+ is incompatible with the MIT license that BookStack is distributed under.
We could change to a compatible license, but I'm not keen on forcing that upon the BookStack user-base as it could functionally impact existing use-cases. I chose the permissive MIT license originally because of the user freedom & simplicity it provides.
Even if we did change license just because of this, this is the second recent license change from Tiny, and they have reflected a very business focused direction, with more code moving out of the open source offering, a higher focus on the commercial offerings, and questionable licensing information (https://danb.me/blog/misrepresenting-open-source/).
I'm not convinced that the open offering will remain further unhindered.
I'm currently thinking the best way forward would be to fork the existing MIT code for our use, likely stripping things back as much as possible to reduce the scope of future maintenance.
This could open up opportunity for easier fixing/development & future BookStack specific ideas, but the added scope & maintaining surface area will very much be significant and is quite daunting.
I may need to spend some time playing the the TinyMCE source to get a realistic idea of potential impact.
Another option is to switch editor library but, from my attempts of this a couple of years back, that's likely more painful. Easy to get something going, but ensuring forward compatibility and feature parity is a wild adventure of edge-cases.