State of the Project Report: Joomla! Web CMS

By Dee-Ann LeBlanc (@deele) Mar 30, 2009

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It's been a long, difficult journey for the Joomla! (news, site) web content management community. Born from a project fork of the Mambo CMS, and with strong early ambitions, Joomla! has struggled at times with its place in the open source landscape, and with the ideas of what is best for both the project and the community.

Between license issues and striving toward a more open, welcoming process, the Joomla! community has had their work cut out for them. Along the way they've made mistakes, but they've also made a popular and powerful open source content management system that promises to only get better in the years to come.

We spent some time talking with various community members and piecing together the project history and current status. Here's the state of the project as we see it.

The Journey Begins

On August 17, 2005, events propelled a group of developers to fork away from the Mambo CMS project (news, site). From there, the Open Source Matters (OSM) organization was created, with the intent of forming a new project that the proponents felt aligned more closely with their idea of open source tenets.

This project became Joomla! on September 1, 2005. Its name comes from the Swahili "jumla," a word meaning "all together" or "as a whole," and the term also happens to describe the Joomla! community's own rocky but determined story.

Joomla! Project's Original Goals

The original intent was to use the GNU Public License (GPL) for Joomla! However, there was an entire ecosystem of proprietary extensions around the open source CMS, with many people making their entire living from these extensions.

In 2005, the core team had a member of the OSM board write up a rider, granting an exception for these extension developers to use any license they wanted.

This rider was added in May 2006, but that wasn't the end of the issue. Over the next year, the core team began to worry that exceptions were not in fact legal within some interpretations of the GPL and may put the project in jeopardy. On June 14, 2007, the official announcement "Open Source Does Matter" appeared, re-committing Joomla! to full GPL compliance and promising that the road would not be littered with lawsuits or snap decisions.

The problem was that they had also decided that extensions had to be considered "derivative works," and so also had to be licensed under the GPL. For many members of the community, this was the first time they'd heard of the issue.

Defining Derivative Works

To say that the new take on extensions caused a firestorm would be an understatement. Proprietary extension developers — many of them making their living from their extensions — lashed out. So did users who relied on these extensions.

Everywhere, misinformation and misunderstanding of the tenets of the GPL abounded. And many people caught in the middle worried that the change had simply been made too late, leaving a lot of developers feeling betrayed — as though they'd been victims of a licensing bait-and-switch.

In protest of the changes, the "Commercial Joomla Developers Alliance" was formed. However, their web site is now down and there is no visible activity from them into 2008 or 2009.

Many of these developers turned back to Mambo — the project that Joomla! forked from — but when the market didn't follow they returned to Joomla!. Of the returnees, some continue to hold out, while others have begun to embrace the GPL point of view.

There's a Model for GPL'ed Joomla! Extensions

Not all commercial developers were irate. Damian Hickey's company, ZacWare, built GPL-licensed Joomla! extensions even before the compliance announcement.

According to Hickey, "It's not going to kill the extensions market, just make it work differently … there are hundreds of viable small businesses that could be formed around great Joomla extensions."