Milestone day for Joomla developers and users. The commitment to the General Public License gains a new boost.

One of the permanent challenges that Free and Open Source software (FOSS) has to deal with is what we may call "entrepreneurial opportunism syndrome", the most descriptive euphemism I have found to label a certain smartass way of making business.

The method is quite simple. You grab a GPL'ed (General Public License) aplication, erase all the authorship and credits footprints, rebrand the name, facelift the logo, replace the icons and voila, you're ready to sell community contributed code as a legitimate product of yours and most of your customers won't even notice that you are in fact robbing them. This is a widespread abuse I have been witnessing ever since I have adopted FOSS as my main workbench back in 2002. There have been countless grothesque attempts to rebrand OpenOffice.org, for instance, just by changing it's startup splash screen! The most notorious fraud I can recall was Lambdaux Office, a shameless hoax devised by a Madrid-based company now apparently defunct. SOT Office followed a similar theft pattern. Even some public sponsored initiatives, like Linex, push this rebranding concept beyond the absurd, by replacing each and every icon, ID and application name. A reliable acquaintance of mine once told me to get over my anger towards these attitudes for they would only discredit the idiots behind them. He was absolutely right.

The threat still exists and repackaging a successful free software application for profit is too much of a temptation. Joomla is, with no doubt, the most popular CMS framework, therefore under the hawk eye of code scammers and other parasites. Today the core dev team has finally decided to start enforcing the GPL clauses so that the source code as a whole retains this license and abuse is tackled from the ground up. In this process we, the community, are requested to keep surveillance and make sure that any Joomla powered website is compliant with the GPL regulations, proving once again that open source does matter. Somewhere in the press release it is clearly stated that "by sticking with the GPL, we hope to (...) increase GPL compliance in our community", a commitment we at Efiplus always took quite seriously, in spite of some of our customers frowning upon it. The rules of the game are clear for everyone. Open Source is a beatiful thing, it makes us all afford bulks of cash otherwise spent on buggy property "rubbishware", but there are elemental principles, honesty being the main.

Major controvery has emerged lately amid some developers regarding Joomla commercial extensions and the best licensing practices. It is a tough dilemma to solve and, in my very own opinion, some coders are going in the wrong direction. Encrypting some portions of their "precious" code with IonCube and other "safe guarding" loaders is at least unfair towards those who have written the API (Aplication Programming Interface) these developers rely on to build their plugins. Furthermore, in some cases the actual set of features provided by a plugin is not worth neither the price nor the encryptation.

The best Joomla add-ons are as much open source and free as the CMS itself, a clear demonstration that things can work also as a business model. It is actually our policy to disregard any commercial or property solution unless it clearly outperforms a free one.