Gpl News & Articles

Do you dream of building a site that's got that special Facebook mojo? You wouldn't be alone. Now you and legions of developers have it one step easier, since Facebook released its Facebook Open Platform into open source. This platform includes their API infrastructure, FQL parser, FBJS and their implementations of various methods and tags.

However, to use this code, you'll need to be aware of the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL), which the Facebook Open Platform was released under.

As we've mentioned previously, the Plone (news, site) community has been in discussions over a slight change to licensing policy. No, Plone is not changing licenses. It's sticking with the GPL.

However, Plone is now also offering the option for those building Plone Framework Components to apply for permission to use a modified BSD license for their components instead of the GPL.

This move is primarily meant to make it easier for componentized Plone code to interact with Zope and Python projects without causing GPL violations. Requests will be considered on a case-by-case basis for components that:

• Are in the plone.* namespace, not the plone.app.* namespace.
• Don't have imports from GPL-licensed code.

The primary developer/maintainer must be willing to ensure the component won't acquire dependencies on GPL-licensed code.

For the official description of the new policy and associated FAQs, see the Plone Framework Components Relicensing Policy document.

Wilco Jansen, the Joomla! (news, site) Development Coordinator and an Open Source Matters board member talked about the importance of engaging the community in his keynote at the CMS Expo today.

While not everyone can commit code, it is still possible to make significant contributions to the project in other more accessible ways like answering questions on the forums.

In addition to engaging the community, the GPL license plays a key role in advancing the growth of the project. There are currently more than 4000 registered extensions available for download under the GPL license.

There is no one person making key decisions, rather leadership is provided through working groups.

For a large group of volunteers, Wilco says that it is quite well organized and "it is a business, not a science project."

[Editor's Note: See our detailed article Open Source: The GPL, Your CMS Project and You]

As the best-known free software and open source license, the GNU General Public License, or GPL, has become both a rallying point for the free software and open source (FLOSS) communities and a focus of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) campaigns for those who fear that these movements will destroy their revenue streams.

Let's take a look at some of the issues and misunderstandings that get in the way.

If there was ever a field where Isaac Newton's famous saying, "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants," held true, open source is it.

So whose shoulders are you standing on when you use an open source Content Management System? l2admin has some well thought out ideas.

UK-based Sydney-based open source vendor Squiz.net (news, site) has rebundled its MySource Matrix v3.20 content management software so that companies looking to install it will be able to acquire all its different elements, even the high-end applications, using its existing GPL, out-of-the box and free of charge.

The company says its goal is to give its clients the tools to build even the most complex web systems without having to install additional product extenders, modules or widgets.

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.
 

There are open source CMS extensions and then there are families of them. These families tend to revolve around a single, powerful core that includes an API, allowing it to serve as a linchpin for a whole suite of related features.

In late January, the folks at Joomlapolis released version 1.2 stable of their popular Community Builder extension for Joomla! (news, site) and Mambo. Now select CB users can check out release candidates of five CB plugins.

Developing a unified web site or intranet for a large, decentralized organization is the Holy Grail for many of today's Internet professionals. Interfaces so usable that ye needn't think is the nirvana of web design professionals.

Get started on the realization of these goals by attending a duo of workshops by IA icon Lou Rosenfeld (author of the Polar Bear book) and usability guru Steve Krug (author of "Don't Make Me Think").