When you have a business selling things online through PayPal, you occasionally get "Item Not As Described" disputes. We have been working on describing AEC very well lately, so these only come up when a customer just couldn't figure it out. I find those disputes very frustrating, especially since we are very responsive and have no problem sending a refund. So there is really no need to have PayPal as a mediator, but some people seem to think they need one.

Now: If you get such a dispute a day after New Years Eve, you know something is going to be very, very wrong. And if the dispute text claims that the user was unable to see our Videos after paying, claiming that there was no way to get in contact with us AND that we didn't respond to requests... you start to get curious...

But I had no idea what I was in for.

This question has come up a couple of times now, so I figured while I already stated why we do commercial now, I should write a bit on why we are not doing free/pro releases.

Following up on the last blog post, I would like to open our bug tracker to five members of the community on valanx.org - If you are interested, please go to the forum thread right here and put in a text on why you want to join in. While I wrote earlier that I fear that opening the bug tracker to everybody would create more problems that it would solve, I think this step could help to establish a small bug-hunting group that will surely be able to deal with the information that is coming in through the forums better than I could ever do it myself. Or have already failed at myself.

With a new slew of reviews coming in on the JED, I decided it is time to address a much iterated point - that of our support structure. One review in particular (I won't link to it except to the page itself because JED links break pretty quickly) summed up the biggest gripes, so I will stick to that and hopefully answer a few more commonly uttered complaints.

I was quite convinced that this kind of failure had died out by now. But there it was, staring me right in the face - security designed by four-year-olds.

A user submitted a payment processor integration and I fixed his code a little. So while I will put the code in our base, I would like to state here that unless you are prepared to check on your transactions - check on every transaction that is - Onebip.com does not offer any sufficient security to ensure your payment notifications are the real deal.

I took great pleasure in editing the exhibit you see on the right side - an actual excerpt from their integration manual.

The manual was updated three months ago. This is no relict of yesteryear. They really mean this.

P.S.: Missed that in their coding example before - did you see how nice they are to possible fraudsters? They suggest you only check whether the provided hash is valid if it is provided in the first place. Screw finding out the one has that is sent in and out all day long - just provide none - hello there, free membership.

Please get lost. It seems like the "commercial" Joomla! development posse has found a way of dealing with the very sane approach of slowly phasing out Joomla 1.0 and non-GPL compatible extensions in the JED: They're building their own directory!

I have written about this in quite some length in the past and I guess my view on this is rather clear. 3DP Developers around Joomla! (or indeed any free software project) constitute an Ecosystem that "commercial" (they actually mean proprietary) developers exploit for their own gain. Building proprietary extensions to a free and open source software package means reaping the benefits of other peoples work and giving nothing back.

This is why the issue should have been addressed much earlier - now there are a lot of proprietary developers who have the impression that it was perfectly fine to do as they did. In some quite heated debates that I participated in on the Joomla! forums (a good excerpt would be here), many of them have made clear that they feel treated unfairly. We have news for you guys: You are victims to a false premise.