Joomla! Discussion Forums

I'm glad that this subforum was created, as the main topics (As well as Louis interesting blog post) got locked and that 70 page topic was impossible to keep up with.

CLEARLY the Joomla team did not consider the ramifications of this change. The fact that people have been harassed and angry posts and e-mails have flown around tells me that A) Joomla did not realize they were threatening people's business with this change and B) they did not give concrete instructions or any kind of "FAQ" that answered all the questions that have been coming up for the last month. If Joomla really considered 3rd party commercial developers in their decision making process (especially JACLPlus by ByosTech who fill a gap by providing ACL -- if this add-on were not available, I would have been forced to use another CMS besides Joomla), they would have had reams of evidence and all of this fully thought out before making that announcement.

And for the people who try to say it wasn't a change, sorry, but the Rider was right there, and nobody had defined the GPL status of add-ons before.

I guess what bothers me the most is that the original "can components be released under a license other than GPL" topic had a strange tone. Basically it sounded like the core team had stripped out the rider "with the intention of maybe rewriting it or adding something else". There were some statements saying that lawyers had been consulted, but I have yet to see some concrete examples from GPL experts that connect all the dots. I think that's really what has made so many people angry. The dots just have not been connected. Joomla expects to have their cake and eat it too as far as 3rd party developers without providing incontrovertible evidence that it MUST be done this way and that non-GPL extensions were removed for legal or moral reasons on the part of the Joomla core. "That's our decision" just isn't flying.

Why? Because attention has been diverted from other CMS towards Joomla. Joomla has drawn huge attention and developers and site designers alike have heavily invested in it. If they had known from the get-go that this was coming, better-informed decisions would have been possible.

I think part of why people are furious about this is that few other businesses operate this way, where the creator of the original product dictates terms to developers of add-ons and templates. It's really bizarre if you step back and look at how commercial software is developed. In fact, Microsoft operates conversely to this, as developers of tightly-integrated add-ons are essentially on their own since Microsoft does not publish intricate details of how Windows works. It is impossible to write a web browser or Microsoft Office type suite that integrates as tightly as the originals because of the reams of unpublished code that makes their tight integration possible. Joomla is saying essentially that they can dictate terms to anyone who extends or adds to Joomla.

So has someone got some concrete evidence proving that Joomla core is in "imminent danger" if they allow 3rd party developers to release under licenses other than the vanilla GPL? Where is it written that "riders" dilute the license to the point of being dangerous and possibly unlawful?

Feldon -

I couldn't go very far into your note because the premise is so shaky. Surely, I misunderstand you?

Are you suggesting that Joomla! is to blame for people harassing others? Joomla! is to blame for people sending angry emails and writing angry posts?

Is Joomla! also to blame for the tens of thousands of alarming emails a small handful of proprietary developers sent several times to those of us who thought we were signing up for helpful training and template hints?

People, adults, competent business owners, are not responsible for their own actions? They are no longer accountable for what they post or write or say because Joomla! did not realize X or give concrete instructions on Y?
If that is the point you are making, I respectfully disagree. I have a teenage son, Feldon. I'm trained at spotting this stuff! 

Regardless of the circumstances faced, mature adults accept responsibility for their actions! If you could at least recognize that, maybe some of the rest of it could be discussed. Unless you just wanted to rant, and, in that case, never mind!.

I guess your post was surprising to me, but, lots of responses have surprised me. It's been a real learning experience.
Amy

The rider isn't in Joomla! 1.X.
The rider was added in Joomla! 1.5.X. in a certain revision and then removed a certain number of revisions later.
Look at the revisions.

Feldon, there are a few things here that I'd like to address.



No one forced anyone to develop for Joomla.  There were no promises made or contracts signed.  What makes you think anyone knew this was coming?  The fact that a rider was written with the initial beta is clear indication that people became aware of it (not just the Joomla team), and wanted to work around it.  The problem is you can't.  The law is the catalyst here, not Joomla.  They made an attempt to correct it with the rider, but that unfortunately did not solve the problem.  In the interest of fairness and staying true to the license they are distributed under, Joomla felt compelled and obligated to share their stance in order to ensure there was no question.



I'm going to have to disagree here.  GPL states very clearly that a derivative work of a GPL'd product must be licensed in kind.  This is not new; it was true from Joomla's inception.  So it is the law that is dictating how developers must license their product, not Joomla.



It doesn't have anything to do with Joomla as a product being threatend, but the simple fact that, again, the license that Joomla is written under is GPL.  GPL is very clear on derivative works.  You have to understand that Joomla is a culmination of many, many programmers, and all of them (not just a majority) have to agree to a rider for it to be put into effect.  Without that consent, it is illegal. Period.

The good news? There is work in progress to develop an app that will eventually allow developers to write software for Joomla that can be licensed separately.  So eventually, this whole issue will be a mute point (for those who use the proper hooks into the system).

Rogue4ngel,

Thank you for your post. Your points in other threads here have been some of the best I've read.

I'm glad that Joomla is trying to figure out a workaround. I guess it seems unlikely that all the people who have anything to say about the Joomla license can be contacted and agree on a rider.


igeoffi,

I was not aware of this. It would take a huge amount of research to read what has been said to 3PD's and what promises if any were made. At this point though it is finding solutions to go forward.

reply to: http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,194341.0.html

I won't comment any further on the rider issue as the previous posters handled it quite well...I will only add in reply to this part of your statement...



No I don't believe the intention was to rewrite it. The issue was clearly: "Did they have the right..." to make such a rider at all!
and here is where the crux of the issue lay....

Joomla might very well have the right to say you can use our code in proprietary work. (LGPL is the best way to do that) but the code has to be 100% theirs, written and copyright to them. That is not the case with Joomla. there are some very integral parts of the codebase (mostly libraries I suspect) that are GPL and owned by some 3rd party not related to Joomla/OSM. Joomla can not give you permission or in essence LGPL (which is what Joomla would essentially be if the rider were to remain) someone else's GPL code. That would in essence make Joomla/OSM in violation of someone else's license. They would have to strip out all of that borrowed code or find LGPL equivilents to replace it with.

That would pretty much break most of Joomla from a compatability standpoint or at best delay any new feature development for a year or two while all the house cleaning on borrowed GPL code was being done. Two years before you could even start on the roadmap promised in V1.6 and V2.0 of J!

And while all of that was going on P3PDs would still be at risk of legal action from any of these 3rd Party GPL copyright holders Joomla code is using because as was stated the rider NEVER was part of J!1.XX license.
Even if the Rider had remained in J1.5, how many 1.5 extentions are actually out there? How many are being used on a live site? If they use the legacy driver in 1.5 that legacy driver is chock full of GPL and puts you at risk of legal action...

For me personally I just don't see how people are so worried about loosing a handful of proprietary products more than they are worried about loosing Joomla...If the rider was kept as it was Joomla could be found in viiolation of the GPL licenses it uses. someone could force Joomla to not distribute and pull the project until the borrowed code was replaced. And I for one don't need proprietary programs as much as I need new features promised in the roadmap.

If the choice is losing Proprietary vs Loosing Joomla I would rather have Joomla.

There are some important points that seem to be getting missed time and time again, I'll make them here but they relate to the vast majority of similar posts.

Firstly some of the facts...

• As everyone already knows Joomla! came from the code of Mambo. This code was GPL.
• In Joomla!(1.0.x and 1.5 with legacy mode on)there are a number of GPL libraries used as well as the Joomla! code itself.
• Any copyright holder from any of the Mambo, Joomla! or third party code has the right to take legal action should they see fit against a non GPL compliant extension. This is based on legal advise from the SFLC.

The points....

Joomla! saying its OK to have non-GPL compliant extensions in no way indemnifies 3pd's from legal action from non-core-Joomla! copyright holders. Its a false assumption that everything will be fine if Joomla! says it is.

If we(Joomla!) go about telling everyone its fine to make non-GPL extensions and then one day a copyright holder from outside the core code decides to take action against all the non-compliant business's out there.... who's everyone going to blame for for telling people its OK to produce non-compliant extensions?

Take it a step further... who will the non-compliant developers look to in covering their own costs with further litigation?

This may all sound far fetched but its not our job to speculate on the welfare of Joomla!. We sought and received legal advice and we took action based on that advice that serves not only to protect Joomla! but also potentially protect 3pd's should they care to listen to what we have said.

All the other rhetoric is interesting and sometimes informative but at the end of the day its just words and generally from people with emotional and/or financial attachments to an alternative view.

Cheers
Shayne

Riogue4ngl, your post and Asphyx's post have helped me to understand what's going on.

Basically people are saying that it is Joomla "making a decision" but actually Joomla's hands are tied because of all this GPL code that Joomla depends on and would rather not have to rewrite. So regardless of what Joomla says in a press release or here on the forum, parts of Joomla depend upon GPL code so the whole thing is, legally, GPL.

If Joomla had said from day one something like:



See, the whole issue really got way from Joomla because third party developers saw it as an attack on their business by Joomla. And the worst possible thing that could happen, did -- a few key forum members here at Joomla.org stated that "open source is the future" or "users shouldn't really be dependent upon third parties" and idealogical statements about commercial vs. open source were made. 3PD inferred motives from Joomla that were patently untrue.

Here's something else I would have said to further extrapolate:



If someone had explained all the issues to me, I would have been happy to write a press release. The problem is so many of the posts in these threads have been conversational without really nailing the issues. No offense to Amy Stephen but many of her posts are "here's how it should be" or "open source is where we're going" and ideological stuff like that which was easy to attack and argue against. The posts in THIS thread stating "Joomla couldn't add the rider even if they wanted to" and giving reasons are what will eventually defuse this situation.

(edit to deal with thread merge)

I will add that Joomla team should be yelling from the rooftops about the future development of a way for add-ons to talk to Joomla without being considered derivative works. It didn't do much for John Kerry, but a "Help Is On The Way" blog post would be helpful, essentially saying:


Certainly more helpful than an "A Case of the Stupids" blog post. 

I think a lot of 3PD have wrongly concluded that Joomla want to stamp out encrypted or non-GPL licenses for idealogical reasons. And from what I now understand, this is simply untrue.

These are clear posts, but honestly they are not saying anything that hasn't been said hundreds of times since April.

People chose to hear what they want to hear.

Some people chose to make up things and say they have heard them.

It is, I suppose, human nature.

From the announcement

The announcement just plain doesn't say what I've said. This is what Public Relations is all about. The arrangement of just a few words means the difference between getting 1,000 confused angry e-mails and getting just a few.

Knowing the background, it might be easy to look at an announcement and feel that it covers the bases. But any kind of press release must be written in a bulletproof manner and "state your case" and Joomla's announcement didn't come anywhere close. I know that Wired.com 'journalists' are about as sharp as a box of crayons, but they would not have posted a news entry "Joomla threatens 3PD's" or something like that if the press release had been more well written.

What I see over and over is that people think Joomla "made a decision". That is the result of a bad, confusing press release.

Feldon - None taken! Thanks for letting me know how you feel! Clearly, I am on board. I support this direction. And, I am eager for our future. I won't make any apologies for that, either. Let's get our problems figured out, and get moving!

Thanks!
Amy

They are saying it because they want to continue to sell non-gpl'd extension and saying those things seems to them like a more powerful argument.

When I read that in April, that sounded very ideological and judgmental to me. It sounded like "the spirit of Joomla is Open Source and there's no room for other licenses."

OF COURSE it sounded threatening to developers.


This suggests that Joomla has made a decision. But if you step back and look at the big picture, Joomla isn't making a decision. They're reporting legal findings. There is a HUGE difference. Joomla can be criticized and held to the fire for one, but not the other.

Oh please.  These (and I'm talking about a small group of developers) are grown up experienced business people who participated in 2 months of discussion  and had excellent understanding of the issues involved. They understand exactly what the announcement said and what it meant. They just are not happy about it.

What they thought they would do about it is try to rile up their customers (and eventually small developers) through scare tactics. That is a kind of public relations that I do not want to get involved in.

Instead, I'll just stay here and try to maintain my patience.

However, I'm sure that if you are interested in working on media issues for Joomla! that you can contact that working group and ask to join. I know that all of the working groups are always interested in people with relevant experience.

I have no classical training or education in PR or writing.


Some great topics that everyone should read:
http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,183749.0.html
http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,183844.0.html

Welcome to the world of open source--where you get to learn about talents you didn't know you had. 

Apparently I'm not saying anything new. Someone else made the same suggestions about how the announcement could have been made.

This is just about the best topic I've seen so far, especially with the inclusion of comments by Louis:
So do you want non-GPL extensions or not?


Again, you've got this conflict between those who ideologically believe that everything should be open source/GPL and those who are clarifying the license for legal rather than personal reasons. There is no WAY that developers are going to spend any more time and money on Joomla if they perceive hostility.

And it is extremely disingenuous whenever someone says "3PD are welcome -- provided they go GPL".

The fact that vBulletin, SMF, and other products cannot even be LINKED to Joomla by way of a bridge tells me that Joomla's future is doomed. Just as I have been prodding vBulletin to make it possible to easily link to other products, now I urge Joomla to do what is necessary to support linking to other products without this GPL "derivative work" nonsense. I'm sorry, but linking and communicating between two programs is NOT a "derivative work".

A CMS MUST be able to link to external software of all kinds.

GPL seems to be a straightjacket and one of the most restrictive licenses out there. I will never release code under GPL if it's going to create this kind of hardship on developers and site administrators alike. LGPL or something else is worth considering.

While FSF may feel that way it is unclear at best as to whether that interpretation is enforceable or even legal in a court of Law. LGPL is compatible with GPL. And LGPL is compatible with any license you can think of. FSF can try and claim that the use of an LGPL library with a GPL product changes the license from LGPL to GPL if used together but they would have a hard time saying that they have the right to change someone else's copyright license for a LGPL product on their own.
It would be tantamount to me getting permission to use a copyrighted work and then claiming because I used that work I can make it a public domain work because my work that was added was released to the public domain.

This would get shot down in court in a heartbeat. Because it is meant to protect ideology not protect copyright holder's rights!

FSF would have to show how using an LGPL library as LGPL would harm the GPL product before they could say it's all one program now and therefore you have to change it's license. It's license hijacking.

It sounds to me that Joomla is not GPL but FSF-GPL which is a mythical beast that does not exist in any court. FSF is sounding like the tough cousin Vinny that you want around when someone is threatening you but otherwise you don't want it nearby because it scares away business.

I know very little about the FSF, but if they are to open source as EarthFirst is to environmentalism, then Joomla needs to find a middle ground NOW and avoid extremism.

You guys almost had me on board until I read this nonsense about being unable to build a bridge to SMF, vBulletin, etc.

It's causing me to backpedal a bit and once again revisit the motives and goals that Joomla team seem to have.

Joomla really needs to decide if they want Joomla to be interoperable with other software. Other lawyers and other companies (including Linus Torvalds) have come to a different conclusion than FSF has on this issue. The example about an Adobe Photoshop plugin being used in GIMP is a perfect example. The fact that the plugin works in both Photoshop and GIMP should exclude it from any requirement that it follow the GIMP license.

I think Louis Landry is a great guy, but the grey line between a compiler and an interpreter that PHP straddles should not automatically make it so any code that is include()'d must be GPL. At the time GPL was written, computers were not fast enough to even dream of the possibility of a dynamically linking real-time pre-compiling language like PHP.

If Joomla were following the generally accepted GPL, there wouldn't be 10,000 pages of topics about this three months after the announcement. If Joomla continues to choose to use the most restrictive possible interpretation of GPL (FSF), then Joomla is going to die on the vine. In this state, it's not just a viral license, it's POISON.

If Joomla is going to really take this stand that software that even TALKS to Joomla must be GPL, then this purported project to try to separate the API out from Joomla will accomplish nothing. We as the Joomla community are drawing a line in the sand and saying Joomla MUST be able to integrate with other software SOMEHOW. Not some primitive "both programs poke the database but do no API calls" kludge, but using modern communications.

Who the heck is going to choose Joomla for a business site if they can't integrate it with anything else?

-Morgan

Ugh, here we go again. Youngens, Ah realizes yall twerent around back in the dayz when we had no teeleevision, and hadz ta make due with thangs like Monochrome green screens, Punchcards and cough..cough.. Cobol, Basic, Lisp. I know I'm jez an ole crippled cobol geezer. I know my memory, eyesight and ability to walk without assistance are all seriously in jeapARDY. But this notion that we did not have languages like PHP when yenz wuz jez in your cradles, is false. We have addressed this multiple times.



In order for a program to only talk, they must be run as separate programs which then simply accept each other's output. Read the SMF post again, the FSF details in their letter the php function required for this to occur.



Actually they can integrate it with lots of other programs. GPL programs and GPL compatible programs amount to thousands upon thousands of available programs for developers to work with. The PHP GPL landscape alone contains many programs that could integrate with Joomla!. The GPL certainly keeps some folks away. On the other hand it also draws many more, including businesses. The company I work for is moving entirely to FOSS. As our legacy applications are eliminated, we move further along this path. So while it is true that there are businesses that will avoid FOSS for a number of reasons, there are also those that are making FOSS use a part of the business decisions, with all of its caveats and benefits. Certainly the caveats of FOSS are less than those of proprietary from a business standpoint. As to a proprietary program integrating with Joomla! see my statement just above this in red.

"We can live without proprietary software" is a head-in-the-sand response.

And your first paragraph is insulting and wrong. GPL v1 was created in 1989 when the primary languages at the time were Turbo Pascal and ANSI C. The most popular interpreted language was BASIC and Java wasn't even on the horizon. PHP came out in 1997.

Do you really think people are going to care about subtleties when there is such a powerful and damning soundbite like "Joomla is not compatible with SMF or vBulletin"?

Morgan -

What do you want Joomla! to do?

I mean *specifically* - an action plan - something with tasks that can be assigned and accomplished.

You've done a fine job of listing our failings; but, all of that is behind us. We need help finding a solution.

So, what do you think should be done? And, how should we do it?

Amy

[quote="AmyStephen"]Morgan -

What do you want Joomla! to do?

I mean *specifically* - an action plan - something with tasks that can be assigned and accomplished.

You've done a fine job of listing our failings; but, all of that is behind us. We need help finding a solution.

So, what do you think should be done? And, how should we do it?

Amy Smiley[/quote]
Simple. Interpret the GPL in a sane way. Take a page from Rosen and a page from Linus Torvalds who believe that simply linking or including code is NOT a violation of GPL. Stop letting the FSF steer you down a road that is going to strike Joomla off everyone's "CMSs worth considering" list.

Joomla MUST be able to bridge with vBulletin, SMF, CommunityBuilder, etc. or no corporation will touch it.

This nonsense of not allowing bridges between Joomla and other products is like criminalizing it for me to learn to speak German. Because I know how to speak to another person and understand their history, I have to accept their customs and way of life? It doesn't work like that.

CommunityBuilder is GPL or at least it was the last time I downloaded it. 

Joomla! doesn't have to link to those other specific programs listed.  It can link to any number of GPL compatible programs.  And linking to compatible programs will do both programs good, it will help both grow and get better, making uneccessary the programs that are not compatible.

Nope you don't have to accept their customs and way of life.  But it is wise in a global community if you want to get along in the world RESPECTING their customs and way of life, and not DISRESPECTING their customs and way of life will be much more beneficial to YOU, and everyone else in the long run.  Maybe you should come up with a better analogy?

Actually "we" can live without proprietary software. "We" being the company at which I am employed. Our needs are different. However, I am not making the claim that all companies can live without proprietary software. There are several cases when a company must use proprietary software. Some of these are legal, some are technical.

Currently we use proprietary software because we are still in our legacy systems. This is a technical reason, that will have a technical solution. That solution involves creating new software. When this is complete, we will be able to eliminate proprietary software use in our company.

Other times there are software programs that are simply not available with a foss equivalent. It might be that there are similar foss programs, but they are of poor quality, or too new to have reached the specs of the proprietary program. Other times there simply might not be any other similar program, so FOSS is required. In this case, any time a FOSS program matches the degree of the proprietary program it is meant to replace, then most certainly it can act as a replacement, and the we dont need proprietary software here is a legitimate response.

In some companies, their legal departments require that they have on file signed documents allowing use of any software. So this sometimes precludes the use of public domain software. It might preclude the use of GPL if they are unable to get signed statements from copyright holders.



It is statements like this that caused the nature of my paragraph to be 'insulting'. It is not wrong. Your statement was that such things were not even dreamed about. However, not only were languages like php dreamed about, they existed. This is a continually brought up claim that interpreted languages were not considered during the framing of the GPL. Balderdash! Do you really think that Richard Stallman was ignorant of existing interpreted languages from his time?

Now the tone of my first paragraph was there exactly because the implication in statements about the GPL's claimed lack of application to interpreted languages is because it is so old that interpreted languages didnt exist. Well they did. Plain, and simple. Folks that do not know this, are either ignoring the facts, or simply just do not realize that we had them. If they are ignoring the facts, then there is nothing we can do about it. If however, they are merely unaware of the facts, due to not having been there, then my post can highlight that old geezers like myself did in fact use such languages. Thus this should lay to rest the claim that the GPL isnt applicable to these types of languages because of its age.

Now you state that Turbo Pascal and ANSI C were the primary languages. Yes? Their bring primary at the time (not true actually..except perhaps for microcomputers), does not preclude the license from being used for other non-primary languages, even if those non-primary languages were interpreted langauges. It didnt back then, and it doesnt now. The level of use of a language has nothing to do with the applicability of the license it uses, GPL or otherwise.



See, here is where we differ. I do not see one reaction to that. I see several. I see some folks being upset and remaining with Joomla! and I see some being upset and staying. I see some of those that stay, remaining with SMF and not upgrading Joomla!. I see some remaining, upgrading and having problems. I see some that remain with Joomla moving to another forum software that is GPL based. I see some folks appreciating the application of the GPL, and I see some disliking it.

The idea that Joomla! will die without this interaction, is no more true than if the same thing were stated about MediaWiki dying without being able to interact with SMF, or Wordpress or MovableType or any other GPL program.

Mmmedia,

Actually, Community Builder is a mix of GPL and "The Community Builder Free License." 

Hmm when you go to download it from Joomlapolis, it simply says GPL and you have to check agree.  That is what I agreed to.

I would think that if it was licensed otherwise it would be listed that it is licensed otherwise, with a link to the license so people could make an informed decision as to what they are agreeing to.

My mistake.  Thanks.