There are several talks about licensing and open source based commercial solutions in the Joomla! related forums, blogs and news. As the inventor of the core Joom!Fish project and one of the main copyright holder I like to give you some insights about our position and some clarifications of what we have in mind.

With the release of Joom!Fish 1.7 we changed the whole code to the Lesser GNU Public license. This step was not because we want to commercialize the project but to make sure that developers which build commercial solutions on Joomla! and the Joom!Fish are able to do this. With the upcomming release we fixed all documentations and license files to fully integrate this step.

Read more to understand some more details behind the license model we use and why we do so.

The reason behind our license model

The Joom!Fish extension is highly integrated into the Joomla! source code. Even though it is an extension and only uses the techniques provided by the Joomla! framework we feel that is important that the Joom!Fish has as few limitations on usages as possible.

The system plugin overwrites the Joomla! Database class and will also do this in future to provide automatic translation support for all extensions. This is why we decided already in the version 1.7 to change to the LGPL license model. As trademarks of the project hold by the company Think Network a special Open Source License was created which was based on LGPL. (The old MambelFish extension was based on Apache License). All source files are changed however it seems we missed some files in the documentation folder, this will be fixed in the 1.8 release. The reason for the additions are to describe the trademarks as well as declare the relationship between Think Network and the core Joom!Fish project.

Additional files e.g. translations or XML files provided by 3rd party developers might be released under a different license. But everything is is included in the core distribution is free.

If you have any questions related to the licensing model of the core Joom!Fish project please feel free to contact us/me at any time.

Future licensing

The Joom!Fish project will stay under an Open Source license for ever!

Neither the Joom!Fish development team nor Think Network have the intension of changing anything on the basic licensing for the Joom!Fish project. We think about additional services which might be commercial services such as professional support or enhanced features. We are very strict in separating those services from the original Joom!Fish project and will ensure that Joom!Fish is free and stays free with all primarily required features for the multilingual translations within Joomla!

Your sincerly

Alex Kempkens
(Managing directory Think Network GmbH & Joom!Fish core developer)