Compass Designs

Normally this blog is full of pretty boring stuff. Like how to How to get People to Read More of your Joomla site or Template Names, Paths and Base URL for 1.5 Joomla Templates. The point is I rarely go off topic..

My buddy Mitch posted about a funny letter that Steve Jobs posted where Richard Stallman educates Dvorak about the GPL.

Louis Landry

Over the weekend I was surprised to see a very public blog post about me at Joomla.org by Louis Landry regarding an email I sent to somebody.

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)

Here at Compass, I have been doing my best to keep up to date with the decision of the Joomla core team to make a strict interpretation of Joomla's license under the GPL.

There have been a few interesting developments over the last few weeks that I thought might be worth sharing.

The GPL discussion at the joomla.org forums is still raging on, the thread has now become the most posted to thread in existence and its only a month and a half old!

The debate has expanded from the license into the business models of the the 3rd party developer community.

"Due to the uncertainty of their futures many developers have paused further development of software for Joomla 1.5" www.jcd-a.org

What does this mean for 1.5?

A few Joomla bloggers have quickly noted a fascinating thread currently underway on the forums at joomla.org.

Essentially, the license [of the development build] has been changed for Joomla 1.5. There is significant potential for the change to greatly change professional development of 3rd party extensions. Will this mean that the healthy commercial community around Joomla will begin to look elsewhere?