A nicely-researched article on Linux.com investigates a growing dust-up in the Joomla! community regarding licensing and business models. Joomla! is an open source CMS package that forked from Mambo a couple of years ago. After encouraging 3rd-party development of commercial add-on modules, Joomla's leadership is reconsidering its approach in light of the core package's somewhat purer GPL license, and is now pushing for "voluntary" GPL compliance on behalf of module developers. Those developers, of course, are pushing back. Ironically, some of the same issues underpinned the original split from Mambo, and perhaps inevitably, there are whispers of another fork, though I think that's unlikely.

The dispute highlights several issues that get debated -- sometimes furiously -- in the open source world, e.g., what constitutes an "extension" to the core, and what "proprietary" means, especially when talking about an interpreted (rather than compiled) language like PHP. I suspect the Joomla! community will sort it all out, but to me it highlights yet another key measure in evaluating open source packages: the maturity of the community. Joomla! boasts an extraordinarily wide and active following, but the community itself remains comparatively young and therefore finds itself still sorting through governance challenges that other CMS communities have already overcome.

Should that matter? Perhaps not, if you are building a personal or simple website (Joomla!'s core use-case). But perhaps so, if you are staking a mission-critical publishing operation and intend to employ many commercial extensions.