Joomla!: there's more gas in this story

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 05 July 2007 06:40

Opinion and Analysis

Yesterday (July 5) I ran an article in this space with the title which is retained above. This article consisted of a reaction to the piece Joomla! - the licence stays the same from the project co-founder Brian Teeman who is now no longer with Joomla!.

As Teeman's 950-word comment contained accusations of innacuracy in my article, I refuted his comments point by point. He then complained to my editor, Stan Beer, that this had diluted the impact of his comment, arguing that he had specified that his piece not be edited and the interspersing of my comments was editing.

Teeman also took umbrage at the inclusion of a quote from Open Source Matters spokesman Christopher Justice which made certain allegations about Teeman.

Fair enough.

Teeman had originally tried to post his comment in response to the piece Joomla! - the licence stays the same. Due to the word limit on responses in our system, he could not.

I noticed he had been unable to post his response - he had complained about it in a brief comment - and wrote to him, asking him to send the response to me, which he did. I checked whether bugs in our system were preventing him from posting but realised that the word limit was the factor to blame (It has now been increased).

Hence I decided to carry his entire comment, along with my rejoinder, as one article. Not a single word was excised from his reply - I only changed the word Joomla to Joomla! - and specified that I had done so.

However, he was unhappy with this.

While we don't agree with his definition of the word editing, we definitely wanted to air his views. But he didn't want them run that way.

After his objections, Stan offered to  carry whatever he had to say as a separate piece. Any response from me would then run as a third piece. Teeman has now written to say that he will not be sending any response but would be happy to have an interview.

The offer remains open - if Brian Teeman does send in his views again, we will definitely run them online. Any others' views on the subject will merit the same response.