In article <f6ie2a$83j$02$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Peter Kohlmann <peter.koehlmann@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> And Roy is totally wrong with his "some Luddites complained because they
> wanted to shove blobs or restricted software into Joomla"
How unsurprising.
> There exist a *lot* of closed source Joomla! extensions (and very important
> ones), and the developers of those were quite angry because they had to
> fear that a licence they had relied on for a long time was to be changed,
> pulling the rug out under them.
> The users of Joomla! weren't too happy either, because they feared that the
> CSS developers would immedeately stop developing any further extensions,
> even pulling the existing ones, leaving the project somewhat stranded.
They aren't changing the license, but there still seems to be some
trouble for CSS Joomla! extensions. The end of the license file states:
"Linking Joomla! statically or dynamically with other modules is
making a combined work based on Joomla!. Thus, the terms and
conditions of the GNU General Public License cover the whole
combination."
That would seem to indicate that they think you can't do CSS extensions
(or extensions under free licenses that aren't GPLv2 compatible).
It's likely that CSS extension developers can ignore that part of the
license, as typically dynamically linked extensions don't do anything
that violates copyright of the thing they extend, and so the license of
the thing being extended is irrelevant, but I haven't looked at the
details of how Joomla! handles extensions, so can't rule out that it is
doing something that does actually make extensions have to follow its
license.
But even if that part of the license is safe to ignore legally, it is
usually bad from a public-relations point of view to do that.
--
--Tim Smith
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