On October 1, one of the oldest Joomla developers, iJoomla, is switching to the GPL license. This week, I took the opportunity to sit down with CEO Merav Knafo and got her her to share her perspective on this shift in business model.
Where did iJoomla come from? What's your background in the web?
I was using Mambo before it forked to Joomla and thought it was great, but I noticed that only a handful of developers were doing it professionally. I thought there could be a market for professionally developed extensions.
When Joomla was born, I had a client who wanted me to create an online magazine. I found it was very hard to do with Joomla alone so I’ve decided to create our first extension, iJoomla Magazine, which was an overnight success because it solved a problem that many users have had with displaying articles in way that doesn’t look like a blog. This client also needed a way to do SEO quickly, so I created iJoomla Metatag Generator, which later turned into iJoomla SEO.
I’ve been creating web applications for 10 years. I’ve created some dating sites and business networking sites and a photography service for online daters called www.lookbetteronline.com. With my two previous companies, created on a shoe-string budget, I had to learn a lot of new skills like marketing, SEO, business development, branding, graphic design, I am good enough at all these but what I am really good at and passionate about is software design, I like nothing more than spending a day writing specs and creating mockups.
For years I’ve created web applications that were not meant for public use. iJoomla was my first project in which I had to consider the needs of thousands of users when designing applications, which means I had to pay more attention to usability, documentation, integration with other extensions, etc. I also learned to appreciate and welcome the customers feedback—our customers rock! They always have great ideas to improve our products and we try to implement as many of these ideas as we can.
Today you've announced that iJoomla is switching to the GPL license. Why is iJoomla going GPL?
It’s the next logical step. This is where the industry has gone and it only makes sense to join in. Also, after talking to a few developers who are successfully using the GPL subscription model, I realized it's a solid business model and worth exploring.
Why did you choose a non-GPL license in the first place?
Keep in mind that back then, in the first days of Joomla, Joomla said the developers could choose any license they wanted. We picked a proprietary license because our business model right from the start included free upgrades for life. It was limited to a single domain so we had to encrypt our extensions with ionCube, which turned out to be quite difficult to support. Many of our customers didn’t like it and we didn’t really like it much either. You can’t be both GPL and encrypted at the same time. Five months ago, we stopped using ionCube encryption as a first step to becoming GPL. It was truly a big relief for us, saves us a ton of support time, and our customers love it too.
What are your future plans for iJoomla?
We just released iJoomla Ad Agency with geotargeting, which makes it truly the ultimate Joomla advertising solution. In addition, we are coming out with a new extension called iJoomla LMS (the name is not final yet), which many people are very excited about. It will allow people to create training programs easily with rich media. I believe every person possesses some knowledge others don't—and this gives them the opportunity to monetize it. Our ecommerce solution, iJoomla DigiStore, is also going to be turned upside down in a good way, so watch out for that one.
Join me in welcoming iJoomla into the GPL community. Look for iJoomla's GPL extensions on the Joomla Extensions Directory or at iJoomla.com.