PixiEditor is switching to LGPL 3.0 license. Check out why and what it means for you.

PixiEditor up to this point was licensed under MIT license. This license is very permissive and allows anyone to use it in almost any way they want. While this is a great thing, in case of PixiEditor, it also has some downsides.

First of all, PixiEditor is a final application, not a library. This means that it is not meant to be used as a dependency in other projects, but rather as a standalone application. We've been developing it for free for almost 7 years now, and we want to keep it that way. We want to keep PixiEditor free for everyone to use, if we continued with the MIT License, someone could just take the app, change the name and sell it as their own software while closing the source code. This is not something we want to happen.

That's why we are changing the license to LGPL 3.0. This license is still very permissive, but it has one key difference. It requires anyone who modifies PixiEditor code to share their changes with the community.

It simply makes sure, that everyone uses PixiEditor on fair terms, if you took our code and made something out of it, you should share it with the community as well.

What does it mean for you?

Probably nothing! If you are just using PixiEditor as a user, you can continue using it as you did before. Nothing changes for you. It is free and always will be. All of the artworks you create are yours and you can do whatever you want with them.

However, if you're a developer and you want to use PixiEditor code in your project, fork it and modify it, you have to make all of your changes public under GNU GPL license, like LGPL 3.0 or GPL 3.0. Please make sure to read the license here before doing so.

Why not GPL 3.0?

We have considered using GPL 3.0 license, a lot of open-source projects use it, but we decided to go with LGPL 3.0 instead, it is a bit more permissive and allows for more use cases, like developing extensions, which is something we are planning to make possible in the future.

Conclusion

PixiEditor is still good ol' PixiEditor. LGPL 3.0 will just ensure, that no one will take unfair advantage of our work. Keep creating awesome artworks and stay tuned for more updates!