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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Wednesday, 04 July 2007 | |
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Page 1 of 3
Adding to the conjecture was the fact that the release of the third revision of the General Public Licence was nigh. Joomla! was known to be distributed under GPLv2 or the second revision of the GPL. Was the Joomla! project hinting that it was moving to GPLv3? The announcement was not have been helped by the fact that the Joomla! project was set up after a rather acrimonious split from an existing project, Mambo, nearly two years ago. But it turns out that there is nothing to it - Joomla! will continue to be released under GPLv2 and the announcement was made only because a single developer had added a rider to the licence about six months back. That rider has now been removed. Christopher Justice, a member of the board of Open Source Matters, which administers the Joomla! project, told me: "...the rider was added very early in the development process of Joomla! 1.5 and during the 11 months, we were focused on the code development. As the release of 1.5 approached, we focused on the release planning activities which included licensing. We then aligned the license back to the GPL vs. adding exceptions." (Full disclosure before we proceed any further: iTWire uses Joomla!, along with a few proprietary extensions, to run its site.) The Joomla! licence states at the end: "Linking Joomla! statically or dynamically with other modules is making a combined work based on Joomla!. Thus, the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License cover the whole combination." To this a lone developer had added the following: "In addition, as a special exception, the copyright holders of Joomla! give you permission to combine Joomla! with free software programs or libraries that are released under the GNU LGPL and with independent modules that communicate with Joomla! solely through the Joomla! extension interface. You may copy and distribute such a system following the terms of the GNU GPL for Joomla! and the licenses of the other code concerned, provided that you include the source code of that other code when and as the GNU GPL requires distribution of source code. "Note that people who make modified versions of Joomla! are not obligated to grant this special exception for their modified versions; it is their choice whether to do so. The GNU General Public License gives permission to release a modified version without this exception; this exception also makes it possible to release a modified version which carries forward this exception." These two paragraphs have now been excised and the licence is back to what it used to be. UPDATE, JULY 5, 12.02am: Another Joomla! developer, Shayne Bartlett, who is also a member of Open Source Matters, claims that there is an error in the information provided by Justice. Bartlett says: "In the article it says... "Note, this rider was added by an individual, it was not approved by the core team, the Open Source Matters board of directors nor was it reviewed by he Software Freedom Law Center (our legal representation).
"This is not correct. None of the OSM Board from that time are involved in Joomla! any more so we simply don't know what was said there, and the SFLC were definitely aware of the rider at the time it was created.
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