Joomla is free, like free beer, like free puppies. Many of Joomla's extensions are free. You can also find a ton of free templates.

That is a wonderful, amazing thing, that you can get software that, ten years ago, would have cost well over $100,o00 -- and it's all for free.

There are plenty of people downloading Joomla and building sites with it. That's pretty much what we do at 4Web, download Joomla and customize it for our clients.

We've all heard about the music pirating going on around the web. Why pay 99 cents for a song when you can download it for free? All of those musicians are rich and famous anyway, so why would they care if I take a copy of their song?

Likewise, there's a bunch of ebooks out there. Those book authors must also be rich and famous. Why would they care if I get their book for free somewhere?

I take posts like these very personally. Why? Because you're stealing from me.

Ok kids, time for some fun ethics tips for working within an open source community.

We do live in an open source world. Lots of stuff is free. Joomla is free. Many extensions and templates are free. Tutorials are free. Some training videos are free.

But there are lots of things that cost money, too.

On my flight home from California, I finished up Clay Shirkey's excellent book, "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations."

In chapter 10, "Failure for Free," he discusses open source projects as one of the great innovators in technology. His argument is that companies invest in their best ideas, but open source invests in just about anything. Every once in while, some project becomes wildly successful, like Linux, or Joomla. (Although he doesn't mention Joomla.)

At the end of the chapter, he tells the story of working as a consultant in the mid-90's, trying to convince AT&T to write some code in Perl, an open source language, rather than in C++. C++ was invented at AT&T, and there was someone they could call for support. With Perl, there was no commercial support, just a discussion board where you could go for help. AT&T could not believe that they could possibly put their faith and trust in an open source project, powered by an enthusiastic and helpful community. Even with rapid, correct responses on the Perl discussion group, AT&T could not rely on the faith and good will of the Perl community. Instead, they wanted a contract, which they felt was far more reliable than a bunch of unpaid volunteers acting out of the goodness of their heart.