BlogDumb Move: Joomla & GPL
In case you aren’t tuned into CMS legal debates (I don’t blame you)… Joomla! is the open-source branch of a product called Mambo. Legal spats caused the core developers of Mambo to defect and form Joomla. Recently, the Joomla team has decided to decide if they should combat against developers who are making money off of Joomla, by offering third party components. They have been evaluating terminology in the GPL license to this extent.
Joomla has every right to use GPL, and I personally don’t have any problem with Joomla using that framework. But, they don’t have the right to pull the rug out from folks. We’ve made our thoughts known to the Joomla team before their decision this week, and I will outline those more in-depth below.
This week Joomla has essentially issued a fiat that declares any proprietary, for-profit, extension to Joomla is illegal. They are exercising their interpretation of GNU/GPL to say that extensions of Joomla (components) are not separate works.
We at PhoneNews.com embrace open source code whenever possible. However, that isn’t always possible. Such a move by the Joomla team, in our view, damages the future of the product. We would not be using Joomla had this decision been previously announced. Pulling the rug out from existing coders, who have a vested interested in a Content Management System, is why products such as PHP-Nuke failed.
I encourage all for-profit Joomla components to disregard and protest this decision. I encourage them to continue their good work. They wouldn’t be in business if there was enough of a marketplace for their specific solutions… to warrant open source coding. Open source is always the optimal solution, but it requires sufficient demand. Joomla is cutting off its feet to spite its Open Source Matters face in this situation. It makes us very unlikely to use Joomla in future endeavors.
