Freethought about Joomla! and 3pd opensource extensions
This is my freethought and I hope it can be constructive for the entire Joomla community.
In the last weeks I followed very carefully the vicissitude of Wootheme and WordPress. For those who are not familiar, Wootheme, a template development company focused on wp, realized WooNav, a custom navigation admin page; this feature, very useful and over all opensource, will be integrated in the next WordPress 3.0.
This made me think, and analyzing the hundreds of open-source extensions developed for Joomla!. It’s hard for me to believe that none of them could be directly integrated in the Joomla! core, perhaps making it better or extending it.
OSM has decided to pay some developers to make Joomla! better, and I partially agree with this idea, but, if some interesting features have already been developed by others, why don’t they get integrated automatically? I believe most developers would be proud of sharing their code with Joomla!.
Francesco Abeni May 14, 2010 08:56:24
Well, in fact they HAVE integrated some extensions. The whole ACL system which is going to be included in 1.6 comes from a third party extension.
I think it is the other way round: the third party developer should donate their code to Joomla, but obviously there’s a catch: they will lose all revenues coming from selling the extensions or from advertising on their own site. So it’s not an easy decision to make.