A couple days ago, I posted CMS Report's Top Ten Stories of 2009. The articles listed were ranked by popularity based by how many times viewed and the rate that they were viewed through the year. Popular stories do not always signify well written articles or are always an indication of personal favorites. Each year, I write a number of content management or IT related articles that I love but for various reasons you the people didn't have interest in reading and sharing.

Below are some of my favorite articles written in 2009 that were not a part of the previously posted Top Ten list. If I had a Top 20 Stories list the articles in both of these listings would be included.

• Looking forward to Microsoft's Windows 7
• Reviewing Barrie North's Joomla! 1.5 book and video
• The problem is bigger than SharePoint
• Testing the water with Acquia Search for Drupal
• Shortcomings of Enterprise Wiki Deployments
• Two CMS Worlds on Twitter
• Charging for online news doomed to fail
• Theme development and the GPL
• Judging Five Overall Best Content Management Systems
• Quoting IT: Addison Berry
  

Some of the most intense debates I've seen in the open source community have been discussions covering what is or what isn't required by the popular open source license, the GNU GPL. For example, it is common practice in the open source CMS market to distribute themes that include the templates (the code) under the GPL and the artwork (including CSS) under a different license. Under the GPL, is this practice legal or not?

On opposite ends of the GPL debate are staunch supporters for and against the GPL. Someone usually argues that distributed theme packages for a GPL licensed CMS must always be distributed under the GPL. To do anything else would be illegal. Another person will usually argue that the time and money the theme developer put into a theme gives him or her the right to distribute the theme any way they wish. When the discussion has finally reached this level of completely opposing views, the sparks will fly.

This time around it was the Wordpress community that found itself asking the various legal questions. Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress asked the Software Freedom Law Center for some legal clarification on the GPL issue. Today, Matt posted an article with the law center's response and provides his own input too. The truth can be found somewhere in the middle.

Development of the SMFforum Integration module for Drupal is no longer.  Amy Stephen over at OpenSourceCommunity.org pointed out on her blog that the module's project  leader, "vb", pulled the module due to licensing disagreements with SMF LLC.  Amy references vb's original post at the Drupal forum, but she has a lot more to say.  Amy's an active participant in the Joomla! community, a community which had their own issues with a bridge between Joomla! and SMF.

According to vb's post, an email sent by Michael "Oldiesmann" Eshom, Project Manager, Simple Machines LLC stated that:

The problem isn't with the smfforum.module file or the packages distributed on drupal.org. The problem is with the "smf_api_subs.php" file that you're distributing as part of the smf api package - it contains modified versions of several SMF functions, and you did not ask for permission to use this code or distribute it.

It appears that Simple Machines LLC doesn't have so much of a problem with bridging SMF and Drupal as much as they have issues with their own code being used without proper permission.  The Simple Machines License clearly states that "Any Distribution of a Modified Package or derivative requires express written consent from Simple Machines LLC."  No word on whether Simple Machines LLC would endorse the use of their code if permission is asked.

The Joomla! community just completed migrating their forum from SMF over to phpBB3. Brad Baker posted some of the details on Joomla.org's use of phpBB3 for their forum. In part, some of the move to phpBB stemmed from Joomla.org's discomfort from bridging GPL applications with non-GPL applications. Baker answers the question in his own way.

Why did we move to phpBB3?
Good question, and there is a simple answer. Whilst SMF was great for us, it is not licensed under GPL, and as a result many of our users who like to follow the choices we make were going to run in to integration issues in the future. As well as that, the team at phpBB have been great, with many of them offering to help, especially with the conversion.
In any case, we’re not going back, and the future is phpBB3!

Beyond a few minor tweaks, it looks as if Joomla.org was able to convert SMF over to phpBB with very few issues. Considering the Joomla community forum usually has hundreds of users on line at the same time, this is no small move for a forum to make the switch to new software. Congratulations to Joomla!

"It is fair to say the GPL does not intend to make it easy for proprietary software.The intention is to liberate code and ensure continual downstream benefits to users. So, yes, it's going to be easier to integrate open source code into a GPL'ed environment. And, as it should be!

It is important that community environments also ensure that open source developers benefit more than proprietary developers. It hasn't been that way in J! [Joomla!] or in Mambo."

 --Amy Stephen, OpenSourceCommunity.org, Comment to CMS Report's Is bridging a GPL application with a non-GPL application legal?

Joomla!'s announcement from June 15, 2007 that began Joomla! is moving to ensure the future of the project by committing to compliance with the GNU/GPL license was a bit shocking to many accustomed to the Mambo proprietary extension licensing exception.

In the world of content management systems, the last few days have been slow for news. I have also had to slow down my blogging activity this week and last week. Until then, here is one of Drupal's founders, Dries Buytaert, explaining why an optional clause in GPL3 will likely not be adopted by the Drupal open source project:

You can't sell Drupal, or any modification you made to Drupal. You can charge money for having to make these changes but you can't make these changes available under a commercial license. Why not? Because Drupal's license, the General Public License 2 (GPL 2), mandates that all modifications also be distributed under the GPL.

But when you are providing a service through the web using GPL'ed software like Drupal, you are not actually distributing the software. You are providing access to the software. Thus, a way to make money with Drupal is to sell access to a web service built on top of Drupal. This is commonly referred to as the web services loophole. Complete Story...

"Few were surprised when Sun Microsystems finally opted to publish the code to its widely used programming language, Java. Sun executives had dropped hints for months that they would make Java freely open to developers, who in turn would be able to tailor and improve the code, used for creating Web-based programs for use on all manner of computer hardware.

What caught some off guard, however, was how Sun (SUNW) would do it. Specifically, Java will be freely available under what's called the general public license (GPL), which also governs the distribution of the Linux open-source operating system."

Complete Story