The Joomla! project does not aggregate the copyrights of its code contributors. No contributor is required to transfer his/her copyright to Joomla! and each individual contribution will forever remain in the ownership of its author. This also applies to translations of the Installation language sets as these alone are included in the core release of Joomla!.

Open Source Matters Inc., a not-for-profit organisation, holds the Joomla! project's assets and represents Joomla!'s legal matters. Joomla! project claims copyright over the total aggregated creation which is the CMS and framework. This copyright is held by Open Source Matters Inc. This is why each file in the release is marked "Copyright - Open Source Matters Inc." This does not violate the copyright and ownership of the individual contributions. These always remain the authors' property. Attributions of the copyrights of contributors and other included code elements is detailed in the main copyright file in the root directory of the Joomla! installation.

As the contributors do not transfer copyright they instead declare that their code contributions are licensed to Open Source Matters Inc. in a limited and non-exclusive fashion. Limited meaning that Open Source Matters Inc. may only use their contribution if it is released under GNU/GPL for the entire Joomla! CMS (or GNU/LGPL in the specific case of the Joomla! Framework Libraries). Non-exclusive meaning that the contributors are free to do whatever they wish with their own creations including using it for their own releases under any licence they wish (including commercial).

Web Standards are documents or compilation of documents that contain definition of technologies or guidance for defining technologies related to the world wide web. These documents ensure compatibility and accessibility among the competing technologies created by many vendors and ensure that anyone who is willing to build or use a technology according to the standards will not be forced to select a proprietary platform. The most prominent issuer of web standards is the World Wide Web Consortium

If you are coming from a traditional website made up of separate HTML pages, you may well wonder where the pages are.

In Joomla! almost everything that you would normally think of as a web page is actually stored in a database. When you create a new page, your content is stored in a database record, not in a separate file.

Then when your site is viewed, Joomla! calls up different items from your database and puts them together to make what is displayed to the user.

One exception is that your images are usually stored in the images directory and not the database.

Your MySQL database usually is created by you during the installation process (unless you use a Fantastico or a similar installer that will create the database automatically). If you have a control panel on a linux host, you can usually access you database through a program called phpMyAdmin. This will allow you to view your database.

For a short tutorial on converting a static HTML web site to Joomla!, see Converting an existing website to a Joomla! website.