Taking Joomla! to new heights

Sam Varghese
Friday, 08 May 2009 06:31

Opinion and Analysis

What drove him to free software? "That's an interesting story. We were a relatively under-funded department in Council so exploring open source - all that (it) meant to me back then was that it was 'free' as in no cost - technologies meant we could duck under the budgetary radar," Eddie says.

Microsoft Office 365

"My first contributions were to a project called dotProject (still going today) and from there I found that the ideals surrounding FOSS were almost genetically imprinted in my DNA. That set the stage for being able to make a very powerful contribution to the world that I could never have dreamed could have occurred."

Joomla! has idealistic overtones. "It has a literal meaning, of course - 'all together'," he says. "But it has idealistic undertones. Shepherd your community. Hold true to the ideals of free open source. Be a steward to the assets that make the project great so that the next generation lives with the same privileges you had. Realise that money is not inherently evil (as the Bible says, the love of it is) so strive to find the balance between licence requirements and commercial realities."

The last time I wrote about Joomla! there was some rather fierce debate on the forums . Eddie says this depth of feeling is because "the conditions under which we forked were ideal to create a major schism in the open source landscape. You had the shiny white knights of the Core Team, involved with and perceived to be protectors of the community. You had the principals of Miro which were seldom seen (but often heard).

"To their credit, they did ultimately have the right commercial mindset, but they just didn't know how to filter that into the open source community paradigm. You had the intrigue of the great announcements from the new Board of Regents of the Mambo Foundation with deathly silence from myself and others on the Core Team. You had the revelation that Miro had double-crossed the community and hijacked the Foundation. And finally, you had virtually every member of all the teams we had leave together and united (all of the Core Team, all of the forum moderators, everyone)."

He doubts that there will ever be conditions like that for quite some time. "Pushing the button that ultimately rocked the world was a pretty hard decision for me. Well, it was easy in that it was the right thing to do, but very hard because I knew we'd turned the world of thousands of people upside-down and because we took the high-road we couldn't explain all of the reasons why we did it."

Do people who are still with the Mambo project regret that they did not switch to Joomla!? "I would say there are still some die-hard fence sitters that are hoping we still fail after all these years," says Eddie.

"The reality is I didn't even know if we were going to be able to pull it off, so it was understandable that others bet on the Mambo horse, and many on Joomla!. There have been people switching back and forth ever since; even staunch supporters for Mambo have realised it's a dead project.

"Later, we certainly saw in the great GPL debate a splinter organisation form called the JCD-A which injected a little bit of life back into Mambo, but ultimately they all came back because Joomla! continued to grow despite the doomsayers."

Eddie says Joomla! will become high-profile once it is deemed to be a threat to bigger CMSs. "It's only low profile in as much as open source gets knocked around and is generally not taken seriously by the enterprise players (and the proprietary vendors obviously have an interest in keeping it that way). Once the likes of Microsoft deem it (or Drupal, or WordPress) a credible threat the project's profile will soon become known, one way or the other.

"Government is starting to wake up to the fact that open source communities behave differently from the standard corporate model. It will take some time, but I think as we get more endorsement from Government, that Joomla! is a possible vocation and leads to employment opportunities, we will see it change."

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