License string is considered invalid in 4.6.2

[Swixos]

We have a license string for angular-froala-wysiwyg which should be valid until the end of March 2026. In version 4.5.2, it was accepted without a problem.

Once deployed to our test environment, we noticed the banner informing us the license was invalid: 'Expired copy of the Froala Editor. Please renew the license.'

We reverted to 4.5.2 for now, but would like to upgrade to the latest version.

[msmallest]

Same. To add to this for a scenario where I didn't think this issue was exactly relevant to me using a "different" version:

TL;DR for anyone until this is fixed: you may have this exact issue even if you do not think you are exactly using 4.6.2. For now, drop the ^ in your angular-froala-wysiwyg version 4.x.y, or the ~ in your 4.6.0 or 4.6.1.

---

My little essay that feels good to write after learning this lesson the hard way:

When I had that exact expired message in the last few days and saw this issue, I brushed it off as not relevant to our own problem as we are a few Froala minors behind. However, I realized this is relevant after a lot of trial and error, as people may think you are not on 4.6.2 but you actually are on 4.6.2, if you make the same mistake as me.

If you use the ^ in a package version in your package.json, and you are on a Froala 4.x.y (ex "angular-froala-wysiwyg": "4.1.0", you will have this issue. To quote a SO thread: "^version “Compatible with version”, will automatically update you to all future minor/patch versions that are backwards-compatible, without incrementing the major version. ^1.2.3 will use releases from 1.2.3 to < 2.0.0.". Hence "angular-froala-wysiwyg": "^4.1.0" would resolve to 4.6.2.

There are good reasons why you often would want to use ^ and a lot of packages like to default like that, but in this issue's case, drop it for now if you are on a 4.x.y.

We only noticed this because of doing package updates this week, but before this week we had no issues and we kept with using a previous 4.x.y for our own reasons besides this issue. The only reason this didn't hit us until now is a convoluted way we version and refer to our package-lock.json. But when we updated our lockfile once we changed other things, boom, this exact issue. But you could very well not upgrade anything and run into this if you regenerate your lockfile and it resolves to 4.6.2.