Joomla Views

In what some people herald as a positive direction for all things Joomla; Joomla Extension Directory (JED) is now officially 100% GPL - just in time to release Joomla 1.5.12 which includes a new BSD licensed PEAR library to complete Joomla's own GPL compliance.

Personally, I think this is a major step in the wrong direction as I think many commercial extension developers will lose a lot of income by getting de-listed and simply fold up shop.

As one comment in the announcement below stated; "Joomla is not community driven anymore" - Open Source Matters (OSM) did not give the community a choice regarding non-GPL extensions in JED but rather confirmed that OSM drives the community and that the community does not drive OSM.

There are plenty of people who are going nuts for this step; and I really hope that I am wrong and that commercial developers will continue to be able to make enough money to stay in business.

JED to be 100% GPL at Midnight (July 01, 2009)

We at the Joomla Extensions Directory are celebrating the next phase of our commitment to the GPL values that Joomla was founded on.   As part of an overall movement toward embracing and encouraging use of the GPL in all aspects of the project, the JED announced in December 2008 that only GNU GPL extensions would be listed as of July 1.  We have led up to this policy change slowly, and we hope with as much information as possible. 

Tonight at midnight is the time and day that only GPL extensions will be listed in the JED.  We're incredibly encouraged by the show of support and cooperation of our third party developers. 

Our developers were given the time of midnight tonight as the target for relicensing their extensions with the GPL. While extensions have been coming to the GPL steadily since our announcement was made in December, a flood of changes are coming in just before that cutoff.  We're thrilled at the overwhelming response to our call to bring extensions into GPL compliance.  Developers have been working well with editors to clarify wording on their websites to assure users of the JED that the freedoms of the GPL will be upheld.

We can't begin to thank all of the amazing developers who have embraced the open source values along with us.  Many previously proprietary and partially closed-source developers of commercial extensions have joined with us in the JED and released their Joomla extensions with the GPL license.  We are confident in keeping the vast majority of popular commercial extensions in the JED due to the developers' willingness to work with our team.

We are committed to working with each of our developers to ensure that their projects are treated with respect and protected from exploitation.  We're further committed to making sure the users of the JED have the most complete, compliant and vulnerability-free list of extensions for Joomla.

Thank you for making that possible.

Toni Marie

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