Joomla! goes GPL - again
GPL? What is that? If you don't know, you didn't pay attention during the installation process of your website. It is the license Joomla comes under. Some things you will want to know about this license, in order to understand what this post (and long discussions) are all about.
1. Software licensed as GPL is free in the meaning of: you can change it as you need, there is no charge for it (the software itself).
2. You are allowed to charge for the distribution of the software (the actual download, or sending it out on CD).
3. As the software itself is free, anyone who has a copy is allowed to distribute it, charging for this or not.
Joomla has always been released under this license. For a long time, ever since Mambo which still supports this, there was a policy of allowing commercial, even encrypted extensions to co-exist with Joomla. In the SVN code for 1.5, there even was a rider added for around 12 months, which recently was removed again.
The problem is that any limitation imposed on the distribution of an extensions makes it non-GPL. Same goes for encrypted code.
Most, if not all, commercial extensions are thus released under other licenses, which are not compatible with the GPL.
These extensions use calls to the Joomla API to run.
Recently one of the main developpers and projects leaders, after removing this rider, declared
a. that the rider was added illegaly as not all code contributors (thus license holders) were informed and asked for approval
b. that this rider should never have been added as it was not compliant with the GPL
c. that all extensions are to be considered as derivative works, and thus need to use the GPL license too
d. that Joomla will seek to enforce compliance within the community from now on.
This was started by a simple forum post, inviting developers and users to contribute their ideas and feelings about this.
The biggest thread ever in Joomla history started, went on and on for about 2 months reaching almost 2000 posts, and almost no core developer participated, or tried to clarify Joomlas intentions.
When the thread started to become really a bit much to manage, and pressure from both users and devs rose to certainly unexpected levels asking for a clear statement about the idea behind this "back to GPL but we've always been GPL", all of a sudden, apparently after recieving legal advice from the FSF, first there was a blog about this, and then 2 pages of posts/replies from Core members finally answering some of the questions.
The thread was then closed, shortly after some subforums opened for everything GPL related - the dicsussions still go on.
Posts were censored, threads closed.
Saka and Predator left the Core team because they do not agree with this change of policy.
Some working group members left also.
The Joomal Commercial Developers Alliance (JCD-A) was created.
So much for the last 2-3 months.
What is the problems for the developers of commercial extensions?
They can still sell their extension even if it's GPL.
But: they couldn't encrypt important parts of it anymore, and they can't keep anyone who has obtained a copy of their product from redistributing it for free!
This basically means they can't protect their work if they want to comply fully with the license.
What is the resulting problem for end users?
Two possible answers:
1. popular commercial extensions continue to be sold as currently, in breach of the license, and they're fine because not the user must comply with the license, but the developer -each dev is responsible for his own license and enforcing it. But at some point Joomla / OSM could decide to enforce the GPL and have them close shop by legal means.
2. to avoid this issue, dev's decide they can't reasonably make an income with support and memberships instead of selling individual copies of their scripts, and stop development for Joomla, which thus looses much of it's capacities and interest.
3. devs decide to change their business model to comply, do not make enoughincome anymore and are forced to quit.
What do I think about all this? ...
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