I think you can find your answers in the announcement.
http://www.joomla.org/content/view/3510/1/Quote:
We are very much aware that a lot of people make their living around Joomla!, and we are sensitive to producing sudden disruptions in livelihoods.
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Next, we ask people in the community to voluntarily comply with the license. At the same time, we try to help people understand what it takes to comply and how they can do it easily. We believe we're going to get a lot of compliance that way.
and the JED itself isn't GPL
Quote:
we clean our own house and bring the Joomla! sites into compliance.
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Joomla! is a unique project with unique needs and unique GPL issues. Solutions won't just come off the shelf. There are solutions and compromises on these issues that we are still exploring
I'm aware that you can find some very loud people (strange enough developers that living on Joomla!) make fun of us because JED isn't in compliance and why we don't remove all proprietary extensions.. and why we don't do it immediately!
We must be aware that Joomla! is a really big community with a huge userbase, and now I'm talking about huge. We have responsibility both for the 3rd party dev's and the community. If we should start to unpublish proprietary extensions it would get severe consequences for the 3rd party developers that have their livehood on Joomla! It isn't of a reason that some developers are talking about to unpublish their GPL extensions as a protest act and not the commercial ones from JED. Because the commercial 3rd party developers know that a big part of their customers are coming from joomla.org. This shouldn't either benefit the community which we all are working for.
We don't see the 3rd party proprietary developers as evil or demoniacal as some few are saying for to make us look bad, in fact they are our friends and many of them have put a lot of time and efforts to our community.
We have to give every proprietary developer time for to make their minds up, investigate their possibilities, give them time to make their licenses compliant and giving them possibility to move to other projects if some feel for it.
We also need time in the community for to adapt us, for to do so that we can continue to offer an environment that attract and do that 3rd party commercial developers can continue to have their livehood on their extensions for the benefit of the community. Work is in progress but solutions won't come over a night.
We shouldn't also forget that we are an open source community with many individual and team driven successful GPL extensions with superb quality and support and with interactions from the whole community. We are also working with ideas how to facilitate and stimulate such projects and interactions.
Only in May we published a bit over 100 new GPL extensions in JED. Together that we get bigger and bigger for each day, the very promising upcoming Joomla! 1.5, our very strong community, our huge userbase (something crucial for commercial devs) and our dedicated WG groups (developers, translators, quality and testing, documentation and design and accessibility) then I think you can figure out the answer on your main question "Is Joomla dying?" aswell.
