I'm not sure why this is such a sticky issue. There are many options available to the Joomla! developers that aren't as disruptive as this article makes it sound. The simplest solution would be to re-license under the Lesser GNU Public License. LGPL was created for the very situation these folks find themselves in. From my understanding of it, it will protect the core Joomla! code from proprietary forking while allowing folks to create third party extensions under their own licenses. I'm not sure what this "rider" exception was, but it would be unnecessary under LGPL (IANAL, but this is my understanding after looking in to such things for several years now).
As for the option of "forking" Joomla! with a version that is "friendly to commercial developers", I don't think this can be done legally under the GPL. If you got the code under GPL, your fork is GPL. Plain and simple, no argument to make.
Joomla! is a decent and popular product. While I don't personally have a lot of sympathy for folks with non-free licenses, I do agree that their software has contributed significantly to the popularity of Joomla!. I don't agree, however, that this needs to be a crisis that calls the future viability of the Joomla! platform into question.
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GPL compliance issues are tearing Joomla! apart
Posted by: Randall Burt on June 20, 2007 04:37 PMI'm not sure why this is such a sticky issue. There are many options available to the Joomla! developers that aren't as disruptive as this article makes it sound. The simplest solution would be to re-license under the Lesser GNU Public License. LGPL was created for the very situation these folks find themselves in. From my understanding of it, it will protect the core Joomla! code from proprietary forking while allowing folks to create third party extensions under their own licenses. I'm not sure what this "rider" exception was, but it would be unnecessary under LGPL (IANAL, but this is my understanding after looking in to such things for several years now).
As for the option of "forking" Joomla! with a version that is "friendly to commercial developers", I don't think this can be done legally under the GPL. If you got the code under GPL, your fork is GPL. Plain and simple, no argument to make.
Joomla! is a decent and popular product. While I don't personally have a lot of sympathy for folks with non-free licenses, I do agree that their software has contributed significantly to the popularity of Joomla!. I don't agree, however, that this needs to be a crisis that calls the future viability of the Joomla! platform into question.
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