The background to a number of the comments I will be making is the recent announcement by the Joomla! core team that the next release of Joomla! will be under the open source license known as GNU GPL without any modifications. This announcement followed months of discussion in the Joomla! public forums and within the Core Team. The announcement resulted in all kinds of reactions, positive, negative, worried, happy. Threats of a fork, withdrawal from the "community," accusations of all kinds. In this blog I will be discussing various aspects of this process from a sociological perspective.
A few definitions
Open source software
Software that you can look at and modify. Sometimes software is distributed so that you can't read the "code." That is closed source. Closed source is generally intended to achieve three things. First, to keep the user from making or installing additional copies. Second, to prevent the user from modifying or improving the program. Open source software
allows both of these actions by the user. Both approaches maintain the copyright of the program's author, but they differ in the licensing.
Core Team
In an open source project the core team is the group of developers who control the project.
Fork
Because users are allowed to modify an open source program they can create a new program, with a new name and new features (as long as the original license and credits are left in place). This is called a fork.
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