I am with the developers on this, the core of Joomla! should continue to be licenced under the GPL. However, I wonder whether the interfaces that are exposed to the developers of external components could use the LGPL?

This is effectively what happens with something like the GNU C compiler and the associated glibc library.

That would indeed be a possible option. For Joomla! 1.5 we have tried to achieve this by removing any none-LGPL external libraries, replacing them or recoding them in our own Joomla! framework. We have also requested developers to contribute their code for use in the framework under the LGPL license, this will allow OSM to license the framework under LGPL in the future if they would like to do so.

At the moment there is one major problem with this approach. There is still not enough clear seperation bewteen the framework part (the API's) and the CMS (Joomla!). While we tried, we have failed to achieve enough de-coupling between both for Joomla! 1.5. Our goal is to improve de-coupling in future releases and have a very clearly seperated framework, that hopefully for Joomla! 2.0 could be licensed as LGPL.

We are trying, we are just not there yet.

Johan

Note : made smaller changes to text

So is this a message to 3PDs wanting to maintain their development model to hold out on Joomla until v2 when a LGPL will allow them lower-level access?

No, it is not.

http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic ... #msg877340

It is not a veiled message, just a statement of intent and vision that we have had. 

Just because a part of a GPL application is LGPL does mean interfacing with the LGPL changes the game.  The code is still part of the greater compiled and executed application which is GPL.

The purpose of making the libraries LGPL is not to change anything about the Joomla! CMS but allow the libraries/framework to live standalone in another context.

Louis

Ah...thanks for the clarification!