The board of Open Source Matters (OSM) has voted to approve the request submitted by the Joomla! Production Leadership Team (PLT) to change the license of the Joomla Framework from GPL v2+ to LGPL v2.1+. It is important to understand that this license change applies only to the Joomla Framework, and does not affect the GPL v2+ license for the Joomla Content Management System (CMS).
This decision by OSM was the final step in a process that started early last year, when the PLT first initiated a public email list discussion and then conducted a survey aimed at the Joomla developer community. When the results of that survey indicated strong support for that potential license change, the PLT requested that OSM research legal issues regarding this potential change for the Joomla Framework. The conclusion of OSM’s research with the assistance of the Software Freedom Law Center was that there were no legal barriers to prevent potentially making that change.
For more background about this issue, please refer to this previous announcement that included a request from OSM for public comments and feedback.
Source: http://joomla.org