Compass Designs

Last week Louis Landry of the Joomla project made an interesting post on the dev blog called Fighting the Stupids.

I thought I would pick up on his theme and highlight a recent discussion that has been developing with regards to the core team/s recent stricter interpretation of the GPL and the hugely popular forum used in Joomla websites, the Simple Machines Forum (SMF)

SMF is one of the most popular forums used in Joomla websites, the official Joomla forums use it. Part of its adoption has been the hard (volunteer) work of an SMF developer Orstio who has developed a bridge between SMF and Joomla.

If you have followed the raging debate around the core team's decision to re-interpret the GPL license for Joomla, you might have noticed a common theme that their belief seems to be that developer's who wish to make non-GPL compliant [emphasis added, I believe this opinion to be legally inaccurate] extensions would be educated to become compliant, or just slip into the shadows, or people would duplicate their project, or their extension wasn't very important anyway.

Well, it looks like the bridge for the most powerful and popular forum for Joomla is going to become unavailable for end users.

I'd note that the source is open for this bridge, its freely available, it just doesn't have a GPL-compatible license because SMF requires a link in the footer.

It seems that the people who will really end up losing are the end users. Before the new license re-interpretation, they had free access to a powerful forum to use in their Joomla website. Now they don't.

All because of a link in the footer....

I'll leave you with a fascinating quote from some guy called Linus. I think he made some bit of code or other, Linux or something....

I've said that over and over again. It's the "spirit of the GPLv2". It's what has made it such a great license, that lots of people (and companies) can use, is very fundamentally that it's fair.

The fact that the FSF sees *another* spirit to it is absolutely not a reason to say that I'm "confused". Quite frankly, apparently I'm _less_ confused than they are, since I saw the GPLv2 for what it was, and they did not - and as a result they felt they needed to extend upon it, because the license didn't actually match what they thought it would do.

I respect peoples freedoms too. I just disagree with the FSF on what that slippery word means. 

I'm damn fed up with the FSF being the "protector of freedoms", and also
feeling that they can define what those freedoms mean.