Joomla! - the licence stays the same

Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 03 July 2007 20:06

Opinion and Analysis

Christopher Justice says: "...we haven't changed the license and we have no plans to.  We have raised the visibility of the GPL and we're encouraging a better understanding of the GPL. It is our view that extensions are derivative works and therefore we encourage all extensions to be GPL compliant. The Joomla! community has grown to over 110,000 members with the same license and a huge community of commercial and non-commercial developers. There are some non-GPL compliant extensions but the majority of the extensions available are GPL. As the project continues to grow, we'll focus more on GPL extensions to build a stronger and more open project and community."

PS: Some background for those interested: An Australian company, Miro Software Solutions, had developed a CMS called Mambo as a proprietary application. In 2001, it moved to dual licensing, and released Mambo under the GPL as well. A legal threat in 2003 led to Mambo being put under the protection of a non-profit called the Mambo Foundation.

Developers weren't happy with the foundation's structure. In an open letter, lead developer Andrew Eddie was moved to write: "We believe the future of Mambo should be controlled by the demands of its users and the abilities of its developers. The Mambo Foundation is designed to grant that control to Miro, a design that makes co-operation between the Foundation and the community impossible."

This led to a break-up - on August 17, 2005, the Mambo core development team, about 20 in all, resigned en masse while work was progressing on version 4.5.3.

With aid from the Software Freedom Law Centre, they formed a non-profit called Open Source Matters to serve as the organisational, legal, and financial backbone of a project which they planned to set up. Joomla! came into being on September 1, 2005, and Joomla! 1.0 was released on September 16.

There's much more to the story but the few paragraphs should suffice for those who want to understand how Joomla! was born.