Posted by Martin Larsen on 07/25/07 23:32

Jerry Stuckle wrote:


> They may interpret it as that way - I haven't seen their reasoning, and
> quite frankly haven't checked their license in detail. But they are
> completely within their rights to enforce conditions above and beyond
> what GPL requires. They just can't require LESS than what GPL requires.

I can't say whether or not this is true (only the court can).

However, I started this thread because I don't buy their arguments *why*
plugins has to be GPL.

To recap, they say:

1. Plugins has to be GPL because they are derivative work of Joomla
2. They are derivative work of Joomla because they are statically linked
to it.

That is the reason for me asking the question in the subject. And as you
have pointed out, it really doesn't make much sense to talk about linking.

The conclusion is that their arguments are entirely wrong.

You asked in another post in this thread if there is another CMS that
the plugin can be used with. There is: Mambo.

Joomla is a fork of Mambo, and while Mambo is also GPL, the Mambo
Foundation welcomes non-GPL plugins for the CMS. At this stage of the
fork, the common code base is still large enough for a great many
plugins to run under both systems without modications.

There are also other forks, btw.

So it is actually possible to sit in this white room without access to
Joomla's code and write plugins for it, without using a single line of
its code, and on top of it, have it running under Mambo too.

Many plugins (at least the ones I wrote) can in a short time be modified
to run standalone. Actually, one of my plugins is also published in a
standalone version. The code it the same, except the interfact part to
Joomla's API.

Martin

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