My opinion, after working in IT for well over 20 years is that the joomla core team are quite correct in clarifying the GPL license issue. The Law is the Law, joomla does not make the Law.Ever since Joomla was first started Joomla.org (and its parent organization OSM) encouraged commercial developers such as iJoomla to create products for Joomla. Now they claim that commercial products may violate the GPL license.....
Many of you have asked us if this dispute is going to change the way we do business. The answer is that we certainly hope it won't. What we want is to continue to provide you with great extensions and great support at an affordable price. I think it comes down to what YOU as a user want and need. Do you want to keep having the freedom to buy commercial extensions? If you do, then you should share that opinion with Joomla.org/OSM.
As explained:
1. Joomla is and always was GPL - this has legal implications as does any license/legal agreement one enters into.
2. Being Open Source (and good) is the reason for the huge and growing joomla user base - not the existence of commercial extensions.
3. Joomla can not be anything other then GPL because the code that it is based on is GPL, and the user community that it serves would NOT use it if it was not open source.
4. The commercial developers have always known this - or should have known this - and should use a compatible business model.
I use a number of 3rd party extensions and the question is, how can commercial 3rd party developers make money?
Well, there are many ways to make money working with open source, and lots of people are doing it - this will be the growth industry of the future.