Taking Joomla! to new heights

Sam Varghese
Friday, 08 May 2009 06:31

Opinion and Analysis

I asked him what kind of business model he thinks is best for a project of this nature, adding that despite his fervent commitment to free software, he did create proprietary extensions for Joomla!.

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"Well, your question highlights one of the grossly misunderstood areas of the economic models," Eddie responded. "'Proprietary' is about the licence of the software, not whether you charge for it. You can have free proprietary and open source software, and you can have commercial (pay for) equivalents.

"The GPL licence of Joomla! actually prevents integration of proprietary licence software on the whole. There are possibly some edge cases, and one notable exception with templates, but you really have to seek experienced legal advice if you want to deviate from GPL-licensed extensions.

"Companies using a business model that produces proprietary extensions will be excluded from all of the Joomla! site resources, in particular the Joomla! Extension Directory. That's a pretty big incentive to comply with the licence requirements. I certainly have a commercial business model for the extensions that I release via JXtended but all the code is GPL."

Eddie and his team have a roadmap for the next version of Joomla! "to include some mandatory and some optional features. Because you are dealing with a volunteer base, it's just too hard to forecast what the software should look like in five years time. However, on the other side of the coin I would like to see Joomla! firmly embedded in tertiary education, developer and extension certification and maybe something akin to the iPhone Apps shop in that time (actually, it will probably happen a lot sooner than five years)."

He has no problem with either compliments or criticism of the CMS as long as they are honest. "I guess the thing I really like hearing is when people are honest about Joomla's sweet-spot," he says.

"I have a dislike for the classic 'Ten reasons why I hate Joomla' because it usually turns into points they don't understand because they don't know how to use the software correctly (or they are remembering how back version 1.0 was at something and haven't realised that in three years new versions do actually get released).

"There was a classic 'Joomla! is evil' post that saw many polarised responses but ultimately the author's credibility was reduced to near-zero because he just didn't like Joomla!, yet tried to frame it within some quantitative mantra."

Eddie lives in Toowomba, Queensland, with his wife and three children. His wife is a pastor-in-training.

"Ironically, I'm doing more in the realm of teaching and training which my wife and I have a chuckle about it since she was a school teacher before she started pastoring," he says. "We are a family that loves Scotch Collies."

Eddie has a technical blog and online book, where, he says, he is trying to address significant deficiencies in the Joomla! developer documentation.