ccNewsletter is now commercial GPL
Despite our best intentions, it proved to be hard to guarantee a steady development of ccNewsletter, and quality support for users if ccNewsletter would remain to be completely free. That is why we have decided to make ccNewsletter “commercial GPL”. In this blog post, you can read more about this decision, and what changes can be expected.
The good news is that for now and the foreseeable future there will be a free version of ccNewsletter.
What is “commercial GPL”?
The GPL (General Public License, read about it here and here) is the open source software license used for Joomla!. Chill Creations also believes in the benefits of the GPL license, so we have licensed all our Joomla! extensions with it. Most of the time “commercial GPL” means that it costs money to get or use a software product, but you still (after purchase) get the benefits of the GPL. Read more about commercial GPL here.
Changes to ccNewsletter
1) Joomla! Extensions Directory
The ccNewsletter listing on the Joomla! Extensions Directory now says “commercial”. We don’t want people to download a free version of ccNewsletter, and only later realise that they have to pay for the latest version and professional support. Let it be clear to the world: ccNewsletter is commercial GPL, there is no free support from Chill Creations, and new versions are available for “customers” first.
2) Support
If you request support, and are not a customer/have not purchased ccNewsletter from our store, we will politely tell you that the ccNewsletter manual and FAQ are free to view, but that we do not offer free support. Paying customers can receive support directly from us in support email, and others, if they don’t want to pay, can best request support from their fellow Joomla! users in their local Joomla! forums or on the International Joomla! forum.
3) Forums
The ccNewsletter forums on our website have being closed. The forum was opened about a year ago for user-to-user support. But we noticed that many topics stayed unresolved, because the users that can help other users are on local Joomla! forums or on the International Joomla! forum, not on chillcreations.com.
4) Free and payed versions
We want to start working with a model in which there is a free and payed version of ccNewsletter. For example, at the moment ccNewsletter 1.0.8 is available for free download in our downloads section. Soon, we will release ccNewsletter 1.1 which will be available for paying customers only. After we release ccNewsletter 1.2, the previous version (ccNewsletter 1.1) will become a free download.
We want to experiment with this model, so expect different variations to be tested in the next months. If the above model turns out to be successful, you can expect a roll-out over our other extensions. This means that it is possible, that eventually we will have a an older version of all our professional commercial extensions, that is completely free for the Joomla! community.
This idea – commercially backed free extensions for the Joomla! community – will be explained in a later blog post. In a next blog post we will also tell you more about ccNewsletter Pro.