Since yesterday, HikaShop has been removed from the Joomla Extension Directory by the JED team. We already had users contacting us in private to ask us why. So I decided to publish this message in order to explain the situation to anyone who would be interested in understanding the situation.
We had been removed once, from the beginning of may to the beginning of june 2011, because the description of HikaShop on the JED had some features related to the commercial editions which is not allowed. We acknowledged that and quickly corrected the description. We thought that the problem was solved and that everything was now OK and made sure that any modification of the description didn't not include any information of the commercial editions.
We discovered that yesterday we had been removed again, and were really surprised.
Here is the new reason invoked by the JED:
"It is the JED's policy not to link to sites that include non-GPL Joomla extensions. You must remove the non-GPL versions from the linked site and no mention of them can be on your site."
We're really surprised that the JED team decided to do that. Other famous extensions like Community Builder, Sobi, Zoo or Acajoom have the exact same business model than us: One free and GPL extension and other commercial extensions available on their website.
We contacted the JED team explaining that we want to play by the rules and we are sorry for any misunderstanding we might have brought. That was not our intent, etc.
We didn't had any answer from them yet but keep reassured that we don't want to stop developing HikaShop and we will continue our work and support our users and customers.