Joomla is interesting because of its plugins not because of Joomla. Joomla without its community of plugins to fix or enhance it is just an empty shell. What a stupid thing to do.

I will buy plugins from whomever sells them anyway. What are they going to do, threaten their audience to stop improving Joomla or take you to court ? This is ridiculous.

I'm really mad at them. I've spent hours trying to understand Joomla and its plugins and now I feel I may have to go and learn another system. What were they thinking?

I've signed the petition to keep Joomla! commercial plugins legal. However, it doesn't appear that Joomla! core - OSM is going to budge on the issue.

Let's face it. There's good Open Source plugins and there's a boat load of really crappy ones. Until they either improve dramatically or a new plugin appears on the scene, I'd much rather pay for a commercial plugin. Generally, my experience with commercial plugins for Joomla! has been very positive and JUser and JContentSubscription are plugins well worth the small investment.

With that said, and I don't know all the business ins and outs of licensing, it does seem like companies could still sell GPL licensed plugins, but would just make their code available to public domain. Perhaps that doesn't make sense, I dunno. But when I know a company's livelihood depends on the profit of a project, they generally deliver a superior product.

I do know that a ton of people are affected by the recent decision of OSM to begin getting rigid about commercial plugins. It's rather unfortunate they allowed the problem to grow out of control for over a year and then drop the bomb. It'll only haunt them in the end, I believe.

Anyway, if I'm not able to use JUser and JContentSubscriptions, then Joomla! will get placed on my shelf and it can rott like the rest of the 1/2 way working "hobby" applications in the Open Source world using GPL.

I'm surprised at the core Joomla team, given that commercial extensions are one reason Joomla is so popular. I hope you continue to support and develop your products. They are important to me. I'm guessing if you had to release source you could just run it through a filter to change vars and stuff and make it a pain in the ass to modify, but even without that I think most people would be happy to pay a yearly subscription fee for docs, updates and support. Cheers, Gary