Joomla! licensing and Thyme

admin · Joined: 01 Jul 2005 Posts: 20

Recently there has been a lot of discussion regarding the GNU General Public License (GPL) and what it means to developers of commercial Joomla! extensions. This has sparked questions from users regarding the volatility of Thyme as a calendar solution for Joomla!.

Joomla!'s license does not affect Thyme.

Most Joomla! extensions fall under the derivative category. Meaning they are works derived from Joomla!. Under the GPL, derivative works must also be distributed under the GPL. One may charge for them or give them away - as long as they are released under the GPL. The huge issue that commercial developers have is that in order to comply with the GPL, they must freely distribute their source code. Further more, once someone has the code, they are free to distribute it in any way they wish. They could offer it for download free of charge. Making it almost pointless to charge money for it. This 3rd party could even charge for it. As long as they also adhere to the GPL. As you can guess, this would be detramental to anyone paying their mortgage by selling commercial Joomla! extensions.

Note: neither Joomla!'s license nor the GPL have changed. This has always been the case. In theory (I do not know if any court cases), it is illegal to charge for a derivative work of Joomla! because it violates the GPL.

Thyme is a stand-alone application - not a derivative work of Joomla!. Thyme does not directly interface with Joomla! at all. Instead Thyme uses a bridge called Joomla! Studio. This absolves it from having to adhere to Joomla!'s licensing restrictions. Joomla! Studio does (must) comply with the GPL and is distributed as such.