PICnet Blog

In what has been one of the most demanding legal and technical thought processes I’ve seen outside a courtroom (before Paris went to jail), the Joomla core team and the Open Source Matters board of directors have unanimously agreed today that Joomla will remain under the General Public License (GPL). Speaking for this writer, I truly believe this will aid in the growth of the Joomla ecosystem and the open source ecosystem as a whole.

The words used by the core team will be parsed, snipped, and likely taken out of context in the days to come, but reading the treatsie from the Joomla.org Web site is a lesson in open source community building and professional diplomacy.

Starting with, “Joomla! is moving to ensure the future of the project by committing to compliance with the GNU/GPL licence,” the letter to the community includes the following sections:

1. Slow and steady. This will be the path to which the community will lead in becoming more GPL compliant.
2. We’re unique. For a community this large, with such a unique history, we’re not going to find quick solutions.
3. Joomla! Web sites (joomla.org sites) will be made compliant with the GPL. Teach by setting the example.
4. Joomla! will ask its huge community to voluntarily become more compliant with the GPL license.
5. The Joomla! community will be committed to providing education in guiding better GPL compliance. Provide aid, not hand slaps.

When a community grows to this size, we all must look inward to see where our core values will lead us. In this case, the entire core team and OSM have spoken in unison, and in this project’s case, the values include compliance with the GPL.

Some people have argued that this is a “strict interpretation” of the GPL. I’m not sure what they mean, however, as this simply is the way the GPL was written. In fact, those providing legal guidance to our community on this issue, the Software Freedom Law Center, are the people that helped write the GPL.

What is left now is to see the reactions of the commercial developers in the community (of which PICnet is one). There have been strong voices on the opinions of the subject, even from Joomla developers that have been around for a long time. PICnet will do its best to lead by example, and in the coming months will be unveiling new options for organizations to acquire GPL’d Joomla! extensions.

I know that one concern that many third party commercial developers have is what they consider a veiled threat of legal action against them for violating the GPL by distributing non-GPL compliant Joomla! extensions. A quote from the forums today from core team member Louis sums up his position quite nicely:

“Lets cut the crap, you guys think that one of us intends to sue you for violating the GNU GPL? It would be a hell of a lot easier for us to just get a band of open source developers together to recreate your project and render it useless. That would take no legal fees, save us time and in the end benefit the community a hell of a lot more than scaremongering and postulating on the ridiculous notion that we are out to get someone. We are open source geeks…peaceful people.”
http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,163492.msg861430.html#msg861430

What is ironic about the entire process, however, is that we’re talking about keeping the same license that is used in the wildly popular 1.0.x series. I know that I personally will be aiding in the effort to help better understand what GPL compliant business models can be made, especially in a community whose leadership has spoke so strongly today in support of it.

This is Day 1. I have a feeling our beloved GPL thread will be growing well beyond its 56 pages by tomorrow at dawn.

During the past few weeks, I’ve been privileged to get a first-hand lesson on the General Public License (GPL). Yes, PICnet is lucky to have quite a bright lawyer on staff, but even he was a little unclear on the GPL, open source, and copyrights. To be honest, I’m not sure there’s many people in the Joomlasphere that have much research knowledge and legal practice in the application of the GPL, so it’s a learning lesson for everyone.

Every once in a while, I get a little morsel of understanding, which I feel is good to share with the community. Today’s installment: who the heck holds the copyright to the Joomla code, and therefore, who has the right to replace Joomla’s GPL license with some other license? Is it the core team? Is it Open Source Matters? Is it free for anyone to change the license as they see fit?

Well, I should say that I’m neither a lawyer nor 100% certain of my following answers, but I believe my thoughts below might help in better understanding this market of ideas.

From my research, and what I’ve learned through listening carefully to the GPL talk at the Joomla!Day USA by James Vasile, Open Source Matters legal counsel and lawyer at the Software Freedom Law Center (you know, the group that actually helped create the GPL!), the copyright holders of the Joomla code are the committers of code to the project. That would mean the people we’d expect, like Johan, Louis, Andrew, and others (maybe even Miro!), own the copyright to their pieces of the code. I should say, they don’t own the copyright to the entire Joomla system, but rather to the code they’ve contributed to the project.

It’s pretty powerful that individuals can give their hard work to the project, still hold copyright, but agree to have it all licensed together under the GPL.

What does this mean? Well, in my mind it means that if Joomla’s license were going to change to another type of license, everyone who has contributed substantially (I use that word without full knowledge of its power) to the code base of Joomla would all need to agree that their copyrighted code could be licensed under some other license other than the GPL. That would seem like a hard feat, since it would require quite a few hands (including people no longer on the core team) to agree together to changing the license.

Moral of this story: based on my ever growing understanding and appreciation of the GPL, significantly changing the license under which Joomla is protected would be quite an effort.

Your thoughts are appreciated, especially from GPL lawyers (anyone, anyone?). I’m here to learn as much as you all are.

We’ve finally been able to get our registration system up and running for Joomla!Day USA West today, and while there’s still some glitches (we’re on it!) you can successfully register for the event now.

Register at the Joomla Day USA Web site

We’re really excited to see everyone there, but remember, attendance is limited to the first 125 registrants.

Thanks to everyone who’s helped in the promotion of this day (especially Peter Russell), and all the help from my fellow PICnetters to make this a reality. Additionally, kudos to our friends at Aspiration for providing their facilitating skills!
Looking forward to seeing you all at the un-conference.

In an effort to help spread the word of open source content management systems (CMS) and constituent relationship management systems (CRM), I was asked to give a talk at OneWorld on March 28, 2007 to the OneWorld Peer Learning Exchange. Roshani Kothari from OneWorld was gracious enough to write up some great notes on it (see below) as well as post a podcast of this.

Listen to the MP3 of the talk

Thanks to Roshani for her hard work to make these OneWorld Peer Learning Exchanges occur, and to my co-presenters Alan Rosenblatt and Guy Stevens for their contributions.

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There’s quite a number of photo galleries available for Joomla, with ports from stand-alone systems to full Joomla components. Every so often there’s a marriage between a great gallery and a Joomla extension that seems to have the right touches. The latest of these is SlideShowPro, built in conjunction by our friend Casey Lee from JoomlaShack.

Now to be clear, SlideShowPro has been created as a stand-alone Flash-based system by Todd Dominey down in Atlanta, Georgia. What is most impressive about it, aside from the stunning looks of a typical interface with it from the front-end, is the ease in which you can manage images and their metadata.

While there are some features that need to be mastered from Flash (that’s right, dig up your Macromedia, er, Adobe suites) this seems to be a good fit for organizations that really want to have an eye-popping slideshow system based in Flash.

Congrats to Casey for a job well done on the integration project.

Last week, Peter Russell from Joomla Juice, the leading Joomla podcast, interviewed moi regarding our efforts in putting together the first Joomla! Day in the United States, as well as the effects of Joomla and open source in the non-profit sector.

Listen to the show directly from the player on the Joomla Juice site or subscribe to the podcast (highly recommended).

Notes include:

• Open Source Matters Board
• N-TEN’s Non-Profit Technology Conference (April 4-6, 2007 - Washington, DC)
  
• Joomla Tuesdays
• Penguin Day 2007 (April 7, 2007 - Washington, DC)
• European Commission
• Joomla!Day USA West (May 11-12, 2007 - Mountain View, CA)
  
• The GooglePlex

For quite some time now, Joomla community members have voiced their desire to be able to purchase Joomla products. T-shirts, bumper stickers, baby bibs, you name it, they want it.

Now, they can get it! Well, back t-shirts that is.

Today, the Joomla team announced the opening of the Joomla Store, in partnership with an online merchandise provider called PrintMojo.com. While we’re still strong supporters of our friends at GoodStorm from the looks of this, it seems like the Joomla team has done some great work and due diligence.

“All profits from the shop will go back to the project to further its not-for-profit aims and ambitions,” said Joomla! shop co-ordinator Levis Bisson. “We’ve always welcomed donations from Joomla! users … now there is a way to donate to the project and receive a cool J! T-shirt.”

Now, if only we can get a bunch of these before the Non-Profit Technology Conference on April 4-6, 2007.

Not too long ago, I wrote a piece called Islands and bridges: why Soapbox will lead the way to CRM and CMS integration for non-profits, where I detailed our vision on breaking down the walls between important technology silos in the non-profit community.

At that time, we spoke only about content management systems (CMSes) and constituent relationship management (CRMs), and while feedback on the blog was quiet, offline we got an earful.

A full three months have passed since then, and I think it’s about time to open the lid on how our bridge engineers are laying down the first strong links between these islands. Especially with postings like that of Allan Benamer from the Non-Profit Tech Blog, where he writes about his favorite stack of stacks, it made me think a response to his post might be in order.

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We PICnetters use Basecamp for project management and when we learned they had released an API and saw the interesting things people were doing with it, we thought, “hey let’s integrate”. Not because it’s cool (though the closer we get to Web 2.0 tools, the cooler we all seem here around the office), but because we saw a need, at least internally, for some extended functionality: easy time tracking and reporting.

Basecamp allows time tracking and it is very nice when checking off a task to record how many hours you spent getting it done. But sometimes we get so engrossed in our work we forget when we started. So, we built a sort of stop-watch application which allows us to punch-in, punch-out, write up a description then send it off to Basecamp.

Another pet peeve of ours is when we run over the number of hours we’ve dedicated to a project, and with several people contributing time to a project that can happen easily if the time isn’t closely monitored. So next up on the integration effort is to develop a warning system which will alert project managers when we’re nearing that limit.

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Gotta love the community. A group of developers are putting their heads together to create an excellent tutorial on the new Joomla 1.5 MVC (model, view, controller) structure and how to build a component using MVC and the new Joomla libraries. This is a great resource for all you developers out there. Hope to see some good components come out in the future because of this.