I am very surprised the Yii team has allowed Sencha / ExtJS to become a "Yii Supporter" and even create a "Ext4Yii Framework."
This is what John Resig, creator of the Jquery framework, said about ExtJS / Sencha and their license policy:
According to the “show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are” wisdom, the Yii Framework project should only associate this intimately with projects that share its open source philosophy, not those that prostitute its spirit to peddle a license using subterfuge to make a buck. The ExtJS / Sencha company is using Yii’s popularity and pristine reputation to lure users in, befuddle them with confusing license terms and get them to buy a license… it’s very sneaky, disingenuous and makes Yii complicit in their despicable practices.
If you want to read the story of how ExtJS went from open source to corporate greed, including John Resig’s quote above, read pablotron . org/?cid=1556
It does not matter, Yii is still being used (through Ext4Yii) to lure users, befuddle them and obligate them to buy ridiculously expensive ExtJS licenses. The Ext4yii project is in fact a Yii4ExtJS scheme.
It’s not saying it’s OpenSource (btw., OpenSource doesn’t mean free at all in general) and not giving you any false thoughts about that it’s free. At the download page it clearly says that it will cost money. Paying or not is up to you.
Prices are there at Ext4Yii website. License includes rights to use all the sencha components bundled so you’re not dealing with Sencha licensing in any way.
btw., I don’t think pricing is so bad. It costs a lot less than would be developer’s salary to develop similar thing from scratch or even to adopt and polish most of the OpenSource alternatives.
I don’t see any problem with it. Yii BSD license allows using Yii for commercial projects.