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[Vince]

This morning I got up to find this delightful email in my inbox. It's a massmailing sent to all developers who have an extension listed on JED so I don't think there's anything wrong with sharing it here.

We at the Joomla Extension Directory would like to inform you about some upcoming changes to the directory policy that will impact you as a developer.  An announcement will be coming shortly about these changes and we wanted our developers to be among the first to know.

These changes will modernize the JED and bring it into line with the overall mission of the Joomla Project. After careful thought and reflection, the Joomla! Project has determined that the Joomla! Extensions Directory should be a community resource that fully embodies the project's values, especially freedom as embodied by the GPL license.
 
On Monday, the JED itself was relaunched on the Joomla! 1.5 platform using a new GNU GPL licensed Joomla! 1.5 version of Mosets Tree. Along with this several important new policies were announced. These will be implemented over the next six months, and the JED team pledges to work closely with the third party developer community as we make this transition.

Starting on March 31 the JED will no longer accept new non GPL extensions and on July 1 all non GPL extensions will be removed. Also, on March 31 the JED will stop accepting new extensions for Joomla! 1.0 and on July 1 all 1.0 extensions will be unpublished.  Finally, by July 1 all extensions will need to fully comply with the project's trademark policies.

These changes are designed to strengthen the project's commitment to its core mission, vision and values as articulated in September 2008.

We understand this will be a difficult process for some developers, and we feel a responsibility to give ample notice. We want to make sure our developers have enough time to make adjustments to their product marketing and business structure, if necessary, in order to maintain their listing in the directory.

Throughout these changes, the JED will be supporting our GPL developers and we have implemented some policy changes to enhance support. We think that the best place to get an extension is from the original developer of that extension.  Therefore we will not link to collections of GPL extensions that are not submitted by the original developer. These are not requirements of the GPL license but rather fall in line with our "forking" guidelines that no direct copies or minor-changed copies of JED-listed projects will be listed.  We support the original project developer whenever possible to maintain the integrity of the listings and support developers who are building and innovating on the Joomla platform.

To have a forked project listed in the JED it must meet our requirements:

    * Significant change-Forked project must represent a significant code improvement, either in features or security and structure
    * Intent to develop and support-Forked project must exhibit an intent to develop and support the new product
    * Unique name-We do not allow forked projects by new developers to build on the name of the original developer without permission
    * Unique version structure- Version numbering must clearly indicate a new project


We thank you for your patience during these transitions. We will extend any assistance possible to making the transition as painless as possible for everyone involved. The project is committed to providing the information and help that developers need in order to relicense (or to license for the first time, if there is no current license). The JED editors and members of the Core Team and Open Source Matters board are ready to advise or assist any developer who would like this help. If you have any questions about licensing or want help, then you can contact OSM with the following email address license@opensourcematters.org or the JED editors team@extensions.joomla.org


Thank you,
Joomla Extensions Directory Team

Bold highlighting is my own.

Notice how the chickenshits at JED thought that by sending that email over the Christmas period they'd be able to dilute the backlash from their decision because businesses would all be at home for Christmas? Sorry to disappoint you all but, despite having the flu, I was still answering tickets on Christmas day.

So, what does this mean?

In short, Jomres and all of the non-GPL licensed extensions (even Commercial Commons, BSD style etc) will be removed from the Joomla Extensions Directory (http://extensions.joomla.org/) if they don't relicense to the GNU/GPL. As a big percentage of my business comes from the Joomla Extensions Directory this will impact how much business I can do and therefore the future of Jomres.

Those of you who have been around long enough will know that GPL rumblings have been going within the Joomla camp for a while now. There are some people who feel that Commercial Developers reap more than they sow by building a business around Joomla, despite the fact that building a business around Mambo (as it was then) was the main focus of many of the original Core Team developers, and indeed encouraged. However, this changed in roughly 2007 and commercial developers found themselves treated like pariahs within the Joomla community, even though some of them worked both on their own projects and as moderators/editors within the Joomla project.

Since then commercial developers have known that in the not too distant future we would lose our listings on the Joomla Extensions Directory and as a result a hell of a lot of our business making opportunities. We've done a few things like set up alternative extension listings servers, one of which is the Extension Professionals http://www.extensionprofessionals.com server, which offers not only listings of all extensions, regardless of license, but links to other services like template clubs, software developers and even Joomla books and their authors.

It takes a hell of a lot of work to build something like a booking management system. Jomres is my baby and I've worked ridiculous hours to build it up into something I'm proud of so we're not going away anytime soon, but expect major changes to allow us to adapt to the changing marketplace.

[adornay]

Ok, I signed up basically to give you this rant vince, don't take it the wrong way.

So what if Joomla are being funny with their advertising, they may have a good reason for it.

Now on finding this out, you do what almost any kid would do, throw a tantrum and start thinking of ways to exclude joomla from your ideal world, or work towards broadening your market, as you say.
But it is joomla and your current package that has kept you in business.

AND YOU HAVE A DEMAND for an upgrade on one of your packages, people are crying for you to upgrade Jombok.
By failing to do this, and instead spending your time messing around changing folder directories, you are losing business, who wants to pay for a version 4 that happens to be in another folder, whith a few minor changes, and takes up more space on directories that are not useful.
You are also putting all your hopes in an unsure market, redeveloping it for another cms system, that few to none of your current customers use.

Will v20 be 2gig in size, because it covers every existing cms, if you are going to design it for another cms, go and do so, seperately, but at the top of your site it states "Total Booking Solution for Joomla".
But its not a total booking solution, because Jombok is in effect dead.

When you could be working on making more money through Jombok, I think you are really silly not to take up all the offers of payments that people have been slinging at you for months now, to get it upgraded.

All you are doing at the moment, is forcing businesses to have the work undertaken elsewhere, they do not have time to wait for you to stop moving folders about, they have to make money themselves, and they won't be doing that whilst Jombok is not available.

Yesterday I was given the task of finding a package that does exactly what jombok does, apart from it won't work with joomla 1.5, considering this is the ONLY software WORLDWIDE, that performs the way this package does, it is a universal package, it can be applied to so many different business models its unreal, yet your pumping your efforts into a property package, when the property market is up the creak.
AND I DIDN'T NEED JED TO FIND IT.

Do me a serious favour, get your head out of the clouds, put your little baby joomres down for a few months, and supply your demand, or turn your baby into some obese malignance with pointless coding, its your business, your life.
You may think you are doing good in the tasks you have set for yourself with v4, but I can tell you now, the reality of the situation is this, if you don't upgrade jombok within the next few months, I'm going to have to get a coder in to provide our site with a package, that offers similar functions as your piece of software did, before it took the back shelf to your anger over losing a link that provided you with customers.
That means you will have lost at least one customer, not due to a lost link but due to your new mission on excluding joomla further than you already have from your package, and should I offer the new Jomboksbak software, you will have lost out a lot more, I should imagine that somewhere in the world someone will have picked up on this little niche market you appear to be reluctant to follow up on, and if they aint, there soon will be.
Not only will you have lost the one customer, but more than likely all jombok customers, because like I said, nobody wants to pay you for moving folders about, and whilst doing so, you will have lost your market, and probably won't get it back either, as they'll all think, he can't be arsed to put the effort in, and left us screwed as to how we can run our businesses on the new joomla upgrade.

Stop being so bitter at JED and the Joomla mob, because they've changed their gameplan.

Yours sincerely

Adornay.

P.S. This might seem like a harsh post, but I'm trying to get your head in the right place, where the money lives, and not stuck happily moving folders about and playing with cms systems not many people use.
CMSMS total forum members (assuming all are users) = 12937
Joomla total forum members (assuming all are users) = 262568
Simple maths kid.

[Vince]

You are also putting all your hopes in an unsure market, redeveloping it for another cms system, that few to none of your current customers use.

I seem to have failed to get my message across in the roadmap so I'll try again here:

The v4 changes are to enable Jomres to be used in multple CMSs, not just Joomla. Whilst CMSMS is being used as the test system, I also expect Jomres to be usable through Drupal and others in due time. That means that Jomres'll be able to run in Joomla, CMSMS or Drupal. It's your choice. Seeing as there are a lot of people out there that hate building sites in Joomla, I think that this strategic change is good for everybody.

yet your pumping your efforts into a property package, when the property market is up the creak.

If I were in the real-estate business, I'd agree with you and go out to get a real job. Fortunately, Jomres isn't about selling houses, it's about property rentals, and thankfully most people still want to go on holiday, even if it's just in-country.

Jomres is a very good option to people for cottage industry web designers who're providing solutions to clients who are looking to reduce the cost of providing bookings online. It's also great for people who are starting out providing their own holiday offerings by specialising in their local markets.

The holiday property rental/hotel booking industry isn't ever going to go away because everybody needs to take time out from work. FSM knows, I do.

Stop being so bitter at JED and the Joomla mob, because they've changed their gameplan.

Bitter isn't the word I'd use. Bloody furious is more accurate.

Back when Joomla came into being 3PDs were encouraged to build busnesses around the Joomlasphere. Now that Joomla's got the critical mass it needs to keep itself going those self same 3PDs, which helped to kickstart Joomla by developing free and commercial extensions for it, helping on the forums and working on the project itself (I used to be a JED editor), are being told "Thanks, but your businesses are evil. Fuck off".


How would you react?

When you could be working on making more money through Jombok, I think you are really silly not to take up all the offers of payments that people have been slinging at you for months now, to get it upgraded.

As for Jombok, I'm considering releasing it with a free license. I haven't touched it in ages and Jomres takes up all of my time plus some. Rest assured though that whatever the license I release it as, it won't be GPL (a nasty little license, that one) but more likely MIT or BSD.

This might seem like a harsh post, but I'm trying to get your head in the right place, where the money lives,<snip something answered up there ^ >

Nah, not harsh. Fortunately over the years I've learned that you cannot please all of the people all of the time. That you need to make business decisions and somewhere down the line some people are going to be disappointed and the less pleasant part of working for yourself is dealing with those people and their often valid complaints.

I regularly say that I've been extremely lucky with my clients, and your post just goes to confirm that my clients, even the pissed off ones, are the best that anybody could hope for. Thanks for that.

[Vince]

Just for fun, while thinking about your comment

Will v20 be 2gig in size, because it covers every existing cms, ...

and because I hadn't done it before, I looked at the size of the Joomla specific code for Jomres. Complete with the Joomla component itself which acts as a kind of bridge to Jomres, the entire code takes up a "massive" 32k. That's only slightly larger than the search minicomponent on it's own, so I doubt that size will be much of an issue ;-)

[adornay]

Vince I can see you game plan mate, and 5 years ago I would have said, yes mate put joomres above jombok.
But you need to understand that your jombok application is a lot more universal than jomres, and the travel industry has been taking a beating over the last 2 years, and its forecast to get a lot worse.
The credit crunch is yet to make its way around to the hotel industry, and be sure it will.

On the other hand, the company I work for has the potential to be massive, when I say massive, I mean uk-national, the only thing that is stopping it, is you not being willing to upgrade jombok, well you aint exactly stopping it, but you are delaying it somewhat.
I'd much rather use a package that you already know, and wouldn't take too long to upgrade, than pay someone else to recreate the work that you have put in.

Vince, I really must stress again, that the jombok package has a universal application, it can be used by more than one market.

Can I pm you and let you know what I'm involved with just to give you an idea on how important this nifty little package is.

And the 2gig comment was to raise the issue about having redundant files depending on what cms you use, I know it won't be much, but sometimes space needs to be used wisely.

I think if you was to promote jombok, heavily, you would make yourself a fortune, you are undervaluing your product, especially by giving away its source code for free.
I wish you would treat jombok as your other little baby, that also needs to be nourished.

[Vince]

the travel industry has been taking a beating over the last 2 years, and its forecast to get a lot worse.
The credit crunch is yet to make its way around to the hotel industry, and be sure it will.

My partner is in the hotel trade, so I know that the current climate has already hit them hard. Many hotel's main business comes from business travellers and if businesses can, the first thing they cut is travel.

That said, there's only so long you can tell your staff not to visit their clients and in the last few months bookings (certainly for my partner's hotel) have been picking up again. Life (and business) goes on.

I think if you was to promote jombok, heavily, you would make yourself a fortune, you are undervaluing your product, especially by giving away its source code for free.
I wish you would treat jombok as your other little baby, that also needs to be nourished.

Unfortunately, there simply aren't enough hours in the day to do everything I want (including updating Jombok).

If you're desperate for a slot-based booking system, take a look at Appointment Booking Pro at http://www.appointmentbookingpro.com/. I haven't looked hard at it, but on the face of their feature list it seems to do what Jombok did. Two advantages I can see are 1. It's reasonably priced, $49 is not a lot of money, and 2. It was updated last AFAICS on the 5th so it seems very much a live project.

[adornay]

Ach lad I really hope you know what your doing, and I do wish you the best of luck in your business ventures.

Thnx for the link though, that does help me out a lot.

You've got a talent that shouldn't be confined to just the one package though.

[joomlanews]

Vince,
it's a pity that jcd-a did not had the leverage to reverse the anti-commercial movement inside joomla core. i see even hard core developers like phil taylor have caved under the pressure and changed the licensing to gpl and try to earn a living out of support. this will of course impact the quality of most joomla extensions.
I have no idea how the JED was back when you were an editor, but for the last 6-10 months we had only trouble with getting our components published. they keep on delaying the publishing and find some weird reasons not to publish them on time.. logo issues, etc... For instance they delayed a lot of February publications in order to get to march so they can block the non gpl ones. also for the past year JED is crowded with spam modules (little modules just to get the backlink from JED). althou i reported some, they never unlisted them so i gave up.

Anyway... it's sad and you have all the right to be furious.

The way i see it there are two solutions: developing (also) for a different CMS with better Licensing (take for instance silverstripe - they have BSD for their system, and it's not a bad one) or to make GPL bridges to your extensions ... the second one i find a little sad for a serious developer, but what the heck, we have to live

Cheers and keep up the good work!!