Some of you may have already received our latest newsletter, some others may have viewed a copy of it on-line. Or, maybe, you have seen it on a Twitter reply to Alledia. The truth is, JoomlaPack will be changing its name to Akeeba Backup and bring a lot of changes and new services to the project.
As explained in the newsletter, this change is not happening overnight. It will be a slow, gradual process. I think that this point is explained in great detail in the newsletter, but I failed to sufficiently explain what stays the same and what changes.
First and foremost, Akeeba Backup will be licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3 and distributed in two different ways. On one hand we will have the Akeeba Backup Core version which is a feature mix of JoomlaPack Core and JoomlaPack Plus. The main incentive for the two JoomlaPack versions (package size) is being dealt with more compact, reusable code in Akeeba Backup. So, practically all of the JoomlaPack Plus features (minus the embedded CRON scheduler, FTP backup and probably the extensions filters) will ship free of charge, full open and unencrypted source code.
On the other hand, we'll have Akeeba Backup Pro. I felt that the basic features are not enough for professional web developers and serious site administrators. Some advanced features such as cloud backup support, backup to FTP support, powerful CRON helper scripts, regular expression filters, database and file filters in external resources (off-site directories and extra databases) and improved compression formats will only be available on a - cheap! - yearly subscription basis. Don't get me wrong; I enjoy writing software, but unless this pays my bills I can't devote all my time to it. Even so, Akeeba Backup Pro will still be Open Source software, licensed under the GPLv3, just not free of charge. The real Freedom is supplying a software tool which you can pay once, then use on an infinite number of sites, royalty-free.
What's more, I am also going to launch personalized services. Many of you have expressed your concern that our forums - even though we are answering lightning fast - are not the ideal support channel for people with strict deadlines ("I want it fixed yesterday") or people with complex problems. That's pretty much true and I am the major bottleneck in this workflow, as I task-juggle between coding and doing support. This where personalized services fit in. For a small annual subscription per domain you get top priority support from the developer, right on your site. That's right, I'll be doing the Internet equivalent of "house calls", fixing problems on your server, more efficiently than ever.
Does this mean that you should stop donating? Actually, not at all. Maintaining Akeeba Backup requires a great deal of my time. At the moment, I am investing about 4 hours every day - while, technically, it's still a part time endeavour, believe it or not. The reason I am willing to continue to give away the core software for free and sell cheap subscriptions is not overly altruistic. It's just a mathematic formula. I figure out that the projected income from subscriptions, donations and ad revenue will be enough for me to pay my bills and turn Akeeba Backup into my main employment. Recognizing that you might be very reluctant to donate knowing that paid services will be launched, rest assured that everyone who has donated over 25 EUR / 35 USD since December 1st, 2009 will receive a 50% discount coupon code for subscription services once they go live (mid-February to mid-March, by current planning). Just make sure that your PayPal email address is able to handle emails from us 
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