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If ever there was to be a day when the unmentionable was to hit the fan, it was today. While mindlessly surfing through Digg at lunch, I happened across a link to this post, which if you are unaware is a response to an exceptionally long discussion about the state of Joomla’s license.

Since being forked from Mambo, Joomla! has retained the GPL with the appended “Rider“, which essentially allowed commercial component developers to release add-on’s for Joomla! with whatever license they desired. If you read the discussion on the Joomla! site, you’ll see quite a bit of objection to this premise from some zealous Open Source advocates.

Their argument is that this “Rider” is void according to the GPL, which I believe they are right in claiming (having read the GPL this afternoon), it clearly states that it cannot be modified or added to. In this regard, Joomla! have made a perfectly reasonable move to right their wrongs, however simply moving back to a pure GPL license instead of something more flexible like an Apache, BSD or MIT license has caused uproar and many shed tears in the commercial developer community.

To quickly explain these licenses, essentially the GNU/GPL requires that all source is publicly available, no matter what and you cannot have any other license for a Joomla! component (for example) other than GNU/GPL. This kills commercial enterprise, because trying to charge for a component would be pointless, as users could simply download the source, install and even redistribute the component for free!

On the other hand, the other three mentioned licenses honour the Open Source philosophy while also allowing code with other licenses to be intermixed with it. So, if Joomla! were to be released under the BSD license for instance, the state of the Joomla! community as we know it today would progress un-changed.

I feel very torn on this whole situation, because I understand the philosophy behind GNU/GPL thinking, I just feel it’s too extreme. It reminds me of when email first hit the scene; All the Post-offices thought they were in trouble and that regular mail would never again be used, but I think you’ll agree that that simply isn’t the case. Email and regular mail live together symbiotically. I have that same view of commercial and Open Source software, I don’t believe that Open Source will ever completely obliterate Microsoft and the other big players, but it will certainly have it’s place. Ubuntu is a great example of that, it’s flourishing and is a huge asset to poorer nations like Africa, but it’s still got a ways to go before it really eats into the market share of the other big players and honestly, I’m not sure it ever will.

The problem at hand is a large one for SM2 however, today while reading Joomla’s intentions for the future, we really got a large boot to the head. We currently only have one commercial component publicly available, but it is doing surprisingly well and pulls in a very healthy revenue stream, which we were planning to build upon and one-day base our entire business-model around. On top of that over the last month or so we had been pruning and polishing a brand-spankin new SM2Joomla! website along with a host of new COMMERCIAL (and non-commercial) components, modules and plugins.

The sad reality for us is that under a pure GPL license, we simply can’t justifiably charge for the code that we put our blood, sweat and tears into. Of course, there are other inconvenient options:

1. We could change our business model so that we charge for support of the components instead of the products themselves. We don’t see this as viable, because eventually someone will make all the necessary support information available publicly, either as a wiki, a forum, or similar. Not to mention, that paying for support isn’t overly attractive to end-users.
2. We could move back to Mambo (which still uses the “Rider”). Umm… Yeah, ahh… NO!!! Unfortunately, moving back to Mambo really is moving “BACK”! Certainly not a move that I’m personally willing to make.
3. Under a very tedious and labour-intensive move, we could (somehow) fork Joomla! and re-brand/re-license it as our own. There are a number of issues with this; First and foremost being that the GPL doesn’t really allow you to do that, but more importantly for us is that this puts the onus back on us to maintain it, which is the reason we use an Open Source framework in the first place.
4. We could (possibly) build applications in another framework and then build “bridges” to Joomla! This is the most likely of situations for us, but incredibly inconvenient as it almost doubles the amount of work we have to do and requires us to relearn and rebuild a lot of the systems we had become so accustomed to.

Whatever road we eventually set our eyes down, the point is that this decision by the Joomla! core team has put a very large roadblock in the future of SM2 and made void a lot of plans and releases that we had slated for the near future.

Personally, at this point, I feel quite shocked and an incredible amount of disappointment. I myself have built a number of components and modules that were going to be released in about a weeks time; countless hours of coding and a bunch of UI stuff that I was saving my very next blog post up to show you. :(

There is a good chance that we may still release some of these things under GPL, so that the work doesn’t go to waste, but in talks with the team today it’s highly likely that we will be spending further countless hours over the coming months to rebuild a lot of our components in another framework.

While it’s too early to know what we will actually be doing, I can say (as a side-note) that we did come across this little gem today. Essentially it allows you to build applications in CakePHP (a Rails copy-cat in PHP), which very simply port to Joomla!

My condolences go out to all those Commercial Developers who based their entire business model (and lively-hoods for that matter) around Joomla! development, I hope you guys find a way to stay in the game and continue to release the high-quality software that you do.

It’s funny…. Things like this kinda make Microsoft look not so bad after all… :S

This entry was posted on Monday, June 18th, 2007 at 4:56 am and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.