Today is Software Freedom Day and this year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the GNU project which shapes so much of what the Joomla community does and can do every day. Free software advocate and friend of Joomla Forest Mars asked me to say a few words at a software freedom event in New York, and this is more or less what I'm going to say.
Licenses shape software communities. From the moment of its conception the Joomla community has been a GPL community. It was made possible by the GNU GPL, supported by the broader GPL community (most notably in the first days by the Software Freedom Law Center), and building the kind of collaborative environment that the GPL fosters.
The core values of the Joomla project are
- Freedom
- Equality
- Trust
- Community
- Collaboration
- Usability
and the GPL helps us to live up to all of those both in our community of developers, designers and users and in what we seek to make possible for communities around the world that use Joomla to tell their stories, share information, run businesses and do untold numbers of other things that Joomla and its license make possible.
We are committed to being a free software community, and we work every day to make that a reality and live up to the ideals behind the GPL and to use the GPL to live up to our ideals.
