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Joomla! is free software. Anyone can
use it, modify it, add to it, study it, extend it, or patch it. Anyone
can share or sell what they have done with Joomla! so long as what they
distribute is also free in these same ways.
To some, free software (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html)
sounds suspiciously radical and certainly idealistic. In recent weeks,
we have seen just how powerful an approach it is. Nearly 40 development
tasks were selected by 25 Joomla! contestants in the Google Highly Open Participation Contest (http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/board,487.0.html). For these
teens, the ability to study how Joomla! works and adapt the code for
their own purposes meant learning to be stronger developers technically as well as in terms of working as part of a community (component/option,com_jd-wp/Itemid,105/p,455/).
During the same period, the community--including some of those same
students-- has come together to work on Joomla! 1.5, making a RC4 a
reality and continuing to make strong progress since then.
We have seen that there are good reasons why free software tends to be of high quality.
One reason is that free software gets the whole community involved in
working together to fix problems. Users not only report bugs, they even
fix bugs and send in fixes. Users work together, conversing by email,
to get to the bottom of a problem and make the software work
trouble-free. (http://www.gnu.org/software/reliability.html (http://www.gnu.org/software/reliability.html))
In June 2007 the Joomla! community
reaffirmed our commitment to use of the GNU GPL. Six months later,
Joomla! is thriving as a free software project. People are
contributing, sharing their discoveries, and helping to build a
stronger Joomla! for everyone. Together we have grown, and we are
growing.
Today, there is a steadily growing developer force making important
contributions to the community by taking Joomla!, adapting it and
extending the benefits of the Joomla! core code. Joomlacode.org hosts
over a thousand GPL and GPL compliant projects freely shared with the
world.
By using the GPL we are able to freely join with the vast majority of
other open source projects, sharing work and ideas and building connections. For example, at freshmeat.com (http://freshmeat.net/stats/#license) alone, some 30,045 open source projects (68% of all listed projects) use the GPL.
All of the parts of the Joomla! community-- users, webmasters, and
developers--benefit from being based in a free open source project. It
makes the software stronger and allows the creativity of our community
to flourish. We are becoming a stronger, more involved working group,
and you are invited to join with us.
That is software freedom. The efforts of one developer can build, but the
impact of a community of developers and users working together multiplies the impact.
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Joomla! is only possible because of the contributions of thousands of people. A community of this size requires a great deal of effort. In addition to the core team, (content/blogcategory/43/85/) hundreds of others participate in important ways as Translation (http://dev.joomla.org/content/view/22/53/), Development (http://dev.joomla.org/content/view/1992/53/), Sites and Infrastructure (http://dev.joomla.org/content/view/40/53/), Documentation (http://dev.joomla.org/content/view/18/53/) and Foundation (http://dev.joomla.org/content/view/13/53/) Working Groups (http://dev.joomla.org/content/view/13/53/) members. Joining a working group (http://dev.joomla.org/content/view/13/53/) where your talents are best applied is only one way to contribute to Joomla!.
Community-driven activities
It
is the members of this community who drive outreach. Joomla! Days,
Joomla! User Groups, local support forums, conference presentations and
white papers, special events and meetings, blogs, and, yes, even
discussions around the office water cooler, are essential to sustain
and grow Joomla! by getting the word out and recruiting talent.
Last year, Joomla! Day events were held all across the globe. Special thanks to those who made good things happen in Melbourne (content/view/2610/74/), Malaysia (http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,124221.0.html), France (http://www.joomladay.fr/), Toronto (http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,116553.0.html), Sydney (http://joomladay.org.au/), Thailand (http://www.joomladay.in.th/index.php/event-english-version), California (http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,153620.0.html), Norway (http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,146689.0.html), Cape Town (http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,174953.0.html), Johannesburg (http://www.joomladay.co.za/content/view/13/20/), Texas (http://www.joomladayusa.org/), Brasil (http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,162957), Hungary (http://hu.joomladays.net/), Manhattan (http://www.joomladayusa.org/), Sweden (http://www.joomladay.se/), Finland (http://www.joomladay.fi/), Serbia (http://www.joomlaserbia.com/), Cape Town (http://www.joomladay.co.za/component/option,com_fabrik/Itemid,39/), Nigeria (http://www.bincom.net/index.php?option=com_content view=section layout=blog id=7 Itemid=77), and New Zealand (http://joomladay.org.nz/). If you are interested in organizing a Joomla! Day where you live, learn more in the Joomla! Days (http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/board,342.0.html) board.
Joomla!
User Groups are a great way to have fun and share ideas, while building
a local support function. If you are interested in participating, see
if there is a Joomla! User Group (http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/board,342.0.html) nearby. If not, consider starting a new user group (http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/board,342.0.html) and help others in your local community discover Joomla!.
Community
members participate in countless conferences and meetings world-wide,
presenting and sharing Joomla!. Events like the recent Pizza, Bugs and Fun (content/view/4274/74/) weekend and the upcoming Joomla! Doc Camp (content/view/4387/1/) scheduled for January 19 (http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,248140.0.html), provide ways for community members to have fun and contribute to the project.
Friends of the project
Without a doubt, we are grateful for the generous support of others. We appreciate our friends at Google who offer the Summer of Code (http://code.google.com/soc/2007/) project and Highly Open Participation Contest (http://code.google.com/opensource/ghop/2007-8/). We thank the Mootools (http://mootools.net/) community for a fabulous Javascript framework bundled with Joomla! v 1.5. We also thank the Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org/) community for an incredible IDE and for assisting in the development of JCode. We thank Rochen (http://www.rochenhost.com/) for another year of professional and dependable web hosting and support of Joomla.org websites. Lastly, we thank the Software Freedom Law Center (http://www.softwarefreedom.org/) for their legal guidance and support.
Joomla! is powered by community
Eben Moglen once said (http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2006/plone-keynote/plone2006-transcript.html),
We are moving to a world in which ... the most important activities
that produce occur, not in factories, and not by individual initiative,
but in communities held together by software.
This
is true for Joomla!. The combined efforts of our community this past
year advanced this project in significant ways. We thank each of you
for giving your time, ideas, talents, and energy to the project. This year, consider participating in new ways that use your talents to benefit the Joomla! community. Together, we can accomplish even more in 2008.
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