The Earth Hour 2009

With only half an hour before 20:30 local time in Greece, I am turning off the lights on my house. Don't know what I'm talking about? It's this year's Earth Hour. We just turn off all the lights for an hour, 20:30 to 21:30 local time, wherever we are on the planet. It's the least we can do for the planet we live in.

Being a person who cares, I've decided to participate. For this hour I am turning off all lights, my PC (which consumes more electricity than a light bulb), light up some candles and enjoy the atmosphere. If I get a sudden Internet connectivity craving, there's always my EeePC. With less than 20W of power consumption, it's the most eco-friendly device I own :)

So, did you turn off your lights today?

Still on the free side

In my last blog post I shared my thoughts with you about having two versions of JoomlaPack, one paid and one for free. Well, 2.1 Stable is released and – as you noticed – it remains free of charge.

There was a number of factors which led me to this decision. The most important of which was the sentimental factor. I began creating JoomlaPack as a small personal project in order to help me accomplish a task I had at hand. I released it under the GPL in hope that other people would find it useful. The rest is history…

I simply found out that the spirit of JoomlaPack commanded that it should remain Free, both as in “free speech” and as in “free beer”. It is my personal attempt to prove that Free software doesn’t have to be an ugly, cryptic, undocumented and unsupported piece of code, meant only for the privileged elite of “hackers” and “geeks”. JoomlaPack was designed with the user in mind, right from the start.

But, let’s face it, the developer, yours truly, does have the need to make a living. Let alone the need to finance this expensive hobby: developing, writing documentation, supporting, improve the web infrastructure of this project does cost money and time. That’s why I decided to keep accepting donations and added advertisements on JoomlaPack.net. I sincerely hope that you’ll keep on donating . This is what keeps this project both Free and “for free”.

As a side note, I’d like to point out that both the “Free Edition” and the “Special Edition” are fully functional and distributed without any charge. You should think of their names as in “free from unnecessary features” and “made for sites and people with special interests in mind”. I know, this isn’t probably the most thought out or correct marketing approach, but you know me… I am just a code monkey, not an advertising agency :)