commercial development in the Joomla ecosystem

Other than the few people who try to encrypt their commercial extensions, how do 3PD Joomla developers make money/prevent mass duplication and free dissemination of their products? I've seen nothing to stop it other than probably unenforceable or very hard to enforce licenses and legal threats, but I've also seen no real "piracy" efforts other than low-grade code snippets in Turkish forums.

Additionally, what is the current political state of affairs re. the Joomla core team or Open Source Matters foundation in their efforts to assert (as Drupal and Wordpress do) that all extensions must be GPL?

And why are prices so low, reasonable, and usually matched with t freebie or trial version? How does this economy work?

I've never really dug into this or figured it out...

19 Jun 08

A question for another night for me!

after 11:30 now.

But OSM has gotten increasingly 'cold war hostile' lately. e.g. they effectively boycotted the JoomlaChicago day and refused to let them oficially call themselves a Joomla Day because commercial developers were presenting.

They have started pressing people to register their sites and hand over their trademarks if they have the word Joomla in their company or Domain name.

Allegedly they also have plans to remove from the JED commercial developers who refuse to register their site/trademarks

Friendly community oriented stuff like that :(

20 Jun 08

Well this explains a lot.

You MUST be forced to be FREE!

Or I must be forced not to pay you.

Where does mutual consent come in to their notion of freedom?

22 Jun 08

Not sure to be honest.

08 Jul 08

dotnetnuke is FOSS and has FOSS and commercial extensions. How does their economic and political situation compare to Joomla? (I want to know, I have no idea.)

08 Jul 08

no idea here either. Maybe ask them?

08 Jul 08

I'm note sure what their hangouts are. I've messed with it just a little.

08 Jul 08

Moving forward, we will continue to embrace the advantages of the open source development model, but we also want to begin to integrate some of the more beneficial aspects of the traditional software business model. Providing users of the software with professional support options that are directly tied to product development efforts, provides very productive feedback loops which ultimately results in higher quality software that benefits everyone. We have witnessed other open source software companies successfully blend commercial product requirements with the open source community, and DotNetNuke can certainly benefit from deeper relationships with both groups of stakeholders. Ultimately, this is really a further evolution of our ongoing mission to create a platform which cultivates a passionate developer community as well as a prosperous commercial ecosystem.

Shaun Walker, President/Chief Architect
DotNetNuke Corporation

.net platform is hugely more supportive of commercial development since it actually compiles code, so you do not have to distribute source. With .net if you want something often you have to pay for it, with php it is most of the time you can find free information/components.

08 Jul 08

http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Blogs/tabid/825/EntryID/1858/Default.aspx

For example, we provide the DNN community with explicit permission to use our trademarks within their domain names or company names. The only exception are top-level domain names or company names which consist solely of our trademarks. For example, it is acceptable to use a domain name such as 'dnncompany.net' but it is not acceptable to use a domain name of 'dnn.net'. This policy attempts to balance the overarching requirement that trademark usage must be non-confusing, while still allowing community members to describe their affiliation to the project.

08 Jul 08

Thanks for the good info .

08 Jul 08

nhamilton--

Thanks for posting. Do you have any ideas on why much of the Joomla culture (or Drupal or Wordpress for that matter) rejects or hasn't considered Walker's view? As for the trademark issue, I'm not sure if Joomla is unique in trying to stop any use of its brand or not. I would guess it is, and that move is flatly out of step with the OS community--a pure power play to attack those who
are taking Walker's view on commercial developers using an open source platform.

I'm not sure what can be leveraged for the benefit of the pro-commercial segment of FOSS ecosystems at a higher level, but I am sure it would help if commercial developers did even more along the lines of:

-blogging/reporting/journalism on the issue
-general organizing to include web developers who are not commercial extension developers but their customers and any other happy paying customers
-general PR strategy focusing on broad benefits of an alternatively commercial sector/models in Open Source. One overlooked point may be the opportunities for small business development
-participate in altruistic and civic engagement endeavors, specifically targetting business 2.0, journalism 2.0, and government 2.0 endeavors, particularly those that empower small organizations, businesses, and municipalities
-stress the need for clear, informative, well-built, attractive sites that in themselves speak to the quality and care benefits of "paid professionals" especially re. the JCDA site.
-push developers to be as open and informative as possible about features, bugs, roadmaps, documentation, support, pricing, and having easy to use and attractive demo and trialware options
-establish/support independent peer review sources
-establish rules and expectations for software distribution (to encode or not encode?) that follow from a consensus on licensing legal issues, interpretation of GPL, etc.