About the freedom of GPL

First of all I have to say something about the license Joom!Fish is based on. It is one of the Open Source Licenses in the world and one of the main ideas behind the license is to exchange knowledge in form of source code. This is a huge value with that you can increase the value of your own work easily and for many people without being aware of it.

Why I'm writing all of this? The reason is that I like to say a huge THANK YOU to Andrew Eddie from New Life in IT (www.newlifeinit.com) as well as the rest of the team fom jXtended. These guys have writting a nice little addon for their extensions to make the installation of related modules and plugins more easy for the developer. And honest it is far more easy. I integrated this library extension yesterday within the Joom!Fish RC to make the installation of all related modules and plugins available to you, our users. It saved me a lot of time and work to be allowed to reuse the work someone else created. So, thanks Andrew, Louis and Rob for this nice little feature.

About free access

On other thing that is something that seems to be a topic within the Open Source world a lot, this is free access. With this free access it is not only meant that you are able to get the source code of a software but also that you can easily download it somewhere. Most of the times you can even download it for free of charge - which is something the GPL does not define as a requirement. However it became a kind of standard that the meaning of Open Source Software also includes a bit, the software is available free of charge.

I personally believe that this is important for a certain type of products. For certain products it doesn't make sense and you would not release it to the public for free because of many reasons. But specially if you provide a extension to something like Joomla! free access in the full meaning of the word "free" is an essential part for me. Some might think that closed partnership programms are important to create a high quality product such as Joom!Fish. Others will go a way which is using different licenses or even stricter access rules. I think all these options are not evil and everybody needs to find his personal way what is best for the own business model and concept as well as what he can justify for him/herself.

The Joom!Fish project, with it's roots in 2004 when the first version of MambelFish was released, was always free accessible. The team that works together today would not have been able to come together if the access wasn't free. So I can make the clear statement for everybody: Joom!Fish is GPL and free accessiable at any time to anybody - and will be this way always!

There is no requirement and there will never be a requirement to pay anything to anybody to get the latest version of Joom!Fish core extensions for all users. You will always find them on a public location such as joomlacode.org. You can download the latest development trunk from there at any time and you will always have the latest bug fixes and features we develop.

So what is this Club all about?

With the ongoing growth of the Joom!Fish community it became more and more time consuming to answer all the questions and help people with their problems. Most of the times we are not solving Joom!Fish problems but standard Joomla! issues like installation of extensions or configuration of modules. This is fine but you can not provide such a support while working fulltime to make your living. So we needed to find a way to enable the community help itself as well as help those members which need a more dedicated support and willing to pay for it as well. In the beginning we did that via the donations - and I have to say THANK YOU again because these had been very helpful.

Now comes the fact that there is a company behind me and other members of the Joom!Fish core team - and in fact at the moment we recieve money for something we are required to define a benefit for those payments. We had the options to either create a non-for-profit for the Joom!Fish project or give you as a donor of the project something back. We decided on the second way and with the formalizaion of the Club we have now a value you get for paying something to the project. You even get an invoice for the money you paid. So the primary advantage you have with paying to the project instead of downloading the extensions for free is that you have a formal right asking us for support and help if something does not work as you expected it.

There are more addons the Club already provides such as a user documentaion in PDF format or additional extensions not everybody needs. And we will work on improving these features of course. So when ever you have a project and you made some money with integrating Joom!Fish or you like to provide a better service to your customers the Club Membership might be a good idea for you.

If you just want to make your site multilingual we are very happy to provide you the Joom!Fish core extension for free of charge and help you out with our community forum as much as we can. But please keep in mind you have not paid anything so your expectation should fit this value you got for free. And if you have no idea how much this value is, check out Ohloh that is giving you an idea about it.

A last statement related the Club. Just because of having the Club we will not make the Joom!Fish core extensions less powerful or bring in new features only in the Club extensions. It is our interest to provide the very best multi lingual extensions for Joomla! in the Joomla! sphere and this can only be done by improving the core features. Our primary focus is that Joom!Fish core extensions shall become mature and reliable base for anything you like to do with your multilingual site. If you want to go beyond the Club extensions might provide you additional features which help you solving special issues.