Commercial Joomla Developers Fight To Avoid Destruction

Joomla's future as a free software product continues to draw divisions in the application's developer community.

In response to last week's announcement that Joomla is moving to "pure GPL," several commercial developers have banded together to do whatever it takes to avoid being killed off. The Joomla Commercial Developer's Alliance is an umbrella organization made up of a growing list of developers of commercial extensions for the popular open-source content management system.

When Joomla's Core Team announced its intentions to begin strict enforcement of the GNU General Public License, software developers who sell extensions started getting very worried. The problem in a nutshell: adding a plug-in or extension to a piece of GPL-licensed software creates a "combined work," and according to the GPL's wording, those plug-ins must also be released under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license.

This could spell financial disaster for commercial developers. As alliance member and ZipCodeShop CEO Michael W. Chalkley writes in an e-mail to Wired News, "the general consensus (among developers in the JCDA) is that we will have to take whatever actions are necessary to protect our time and money invested in developing quality Joomla components."

Currently, there's still a chance that a disclaimer allowing commercial extensions could be included in the Joomla license. But if Joomla is moving to "pure GPL" as the Core team intends, the disclaimer, which is included in the current Joomla distribution, may have to go away. [UPDATE: reader Ryan writes: "This is not actually true, since if you look at the license in the current version of Joomla (1.0.12) as well as in the upcoming major release in SVN (1.5), neither have this disclaimer."] One self-defense tactic being considered by the JCDA involves lobbying the Joomla Core Team to insert such a disclaimer.

Where does this wrangling leave these commercial developers? JCDA site administrator Vimes answers that question eloquently:

With established businesses that we previously believed were honourable but now we're being told they're not. With client bases who're clamouring for our software to be ready for the next version of Joomla but we can't supply them (even if we've already written it). With the horrible, sinking feeling that our precious customers, that we've courted and danced with to get them to buy our code, are going to be left high and dry because we're no longer allowed to supply our software for their CMS of choice. In short, with a huge customer base that we may no longer be allowed to supply/support, and the urgent need to look for day jobs. And you're wondering why we're worried?

In the same thread, Vimes also explains that many extension developers use revenue from their commercial products to subsidize the development and support of several non-commercial extensions. If the revenue dries up, he argues, those free extensions will suffer.

Meanwhile, the future is still being debated on the Joomla forums.

UPDATE: While it's obvious from reading the comments that many of you feel strongly about this issue, some have crossed the line into hate speech. As a result, comments for this post have been closed. If you have more to say about Joomla and commercial developers, leave a comment on our original post on Compiler.