The Joomla Commercial Developer's Alliance would like to thank the members of all the teams that gave of their time to arrive at and compose this license FAQ and statement so that the Joomla! community could better understand the Joomla! License and it's implications.
We are naturally disappointed that the implied Gentleman's Agreement which has been in place for so long, and the promised Rider that we had hoped would replace it has not materialised. It had been this expectation of protection from litigation that had helped to build such a vibrant and growing network of commercially licensed extensions around the framework of Joomla, and the lack of this protection is likely to stifle further growth in this area.
Whilst we appreciate the clarification made in this statement we deny that extensions that are designed to work with Joomla can be considered derivative simply by their nature. Our advice and research indicate that there is plenty of legal argument that supports this view and we would invite Open Source Matters to open communications with us regarding this matter. To that end we would like to encourage all Joomla Commercial Developers to continue developing their code for the Joomla 1.0.x series.
We continue to maintain some misgivings about points raised within the Joomla community regarding commercial developers and their contribution to said community. There have been allegations that commercial developers do not give back to the community however these allegations are based around the assumption that any giving back to the community has merit only if it is in the form of financial contributions. There are numerous examples of commercial developers providing support in the Joomla forums and other Joomla sites, not to mention on their own forums. It could also be argued that simply the existence of their extensions provides considerable value add to the viability of Joomla as a platform.
We are particularly disappointed by those Core Team members who declined to enter the debate and help to clarify the comments being made regarding the status of the rider. This would have saved a lot of time in the discussion. We note that they have all made statements now and are particularly disappointed that they have chosen to represent the actions of a former Core Team member, Founder of Joomla and OSM Director, as illegal.
Finally, we would encourage the Core team to consider removing the statement
* @copyright Copyright (C) 2005 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved.
from all files that this affects in the Joomla distribution as statements made by members of the Joomla core indicate that this is inaccurate.
Again, we would like again to thank the Joomla Core, Open Source Matters and everybody at the Software Freedom Law Center for their input into this matter.
Joomla Commercial Developer's Alliance
This statement is in reply to
http://www.joomla.org/content/view/3510/1/http://dev.joomla.org/content/view/2336/102/From:
http://jcd-a.org/component/option,com_smf/Itemid,28/topic,139.0/Now, what will this mean concrete for my components:
- I will not start working on making my components compatible with Joomla 1.5 for now
- I will start building a LGPL framework which will act as a replacement to Joomla's core features, using this library I can comply with the GPL compatibility,
while keeping the freedom to license components in a way I wish.
- Using this framework isn't a bad thing, it will eventually allow my users to run components standalone, on mambo and who knows what other CMS as well
- I will be switching the license for my Creative Commons licensed components to the Joomla-Addons Free Software License which is more clear about what is allowed and what isn't (license content can be found here:
http://www.joomla-addons.org/joomla-addons-free-software-license.html).
- I will start releasing a great part of the Hosting Customers un-encoded allowing people to make modifications to the code. The site licensing part will remain encrypted.
I would like to stress out that we
WILL keep supporting anyone that uses our components, modules and plugins and that we
will keep developing for Joomla, Mambo and other CMS's.
Game on
Adam
