Category Archives: Free Culture

You Do Not Scale

Posted on by
1

“Most developers are itching to be a part of their favorite projects. You do not scale, but by giving developers tools and getting out of their way, your project can. So please remember that when issues are reported on your open source project, you should not fix them. I hope this serves you well and would love to hear about your experiences and help any way I can.”
By Wesley Beary in “Less is More published Nov 27, 2011. Hat tip Jake Dahn.

A leader will always lead by being prepared to do the work themselves, but I’m really feeling what @geemus wrote.

It is in the ethos of the WordPress community, and the company, my former employer, Matt Mullenweg formed to support it. Here is my favorite part of the Automattic Creed:

“I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything.”

I’m excited by the help I’m receiving from my new colleagues at Piston Cloud and the OpenStack community.

Pistoneers are kindred spirits of Automatticians. Before joining the Piston Cloud team I noted automation being a regular theme on “Our Team“.

Ma.tt: not a robot

Posted on by
Reply

Even after working for Matt Mullenweg for over four years now (my longest job!), it still totally pumps me up how forward thinking, thoughtful, and human Matt is.

From the ThemeShaper article “Premium Themes on WP.com, the backstory“:

“…it became obvious to me that we had to figure out the GPL issues first so introducing a WP.com marketplace wouldn’t inadvertently harm the WordPress community by sucking the air out of .org theme development, so I held off the revenue and success we knew this would bring to work out the GPL issues out with the community.

…

But very explicitly this is an experiment. We’re not psychic and there are many open questions: Will anyone buy these things? How will the private forums work for support, both for our users and partners? How long does it take us to review and get a new theme online? What’s the most effective price ranges? How many themes and partners should we have? How do we promote the premium themes, while balancing adding new free ones? Will any of them ever be more popular than the Smoothie? (51,109 blogs and counting.)

Go read the full article.

Could WordPress have a better BDFL?

WordPress does one thing very well…

Posted on by
11

…allow everyone to easily publish on the Web!

And to make that happen, WordPress must be an easy to develop and design web publishing environment.

Stop! This is comparing apples and oranges. [WordPress] is a honed, refined blogging product that does one thing very well, whereas Drupal is a flexible, extensible CMS plus a huge set of tools for building websites, web applications, and integrating with other tools.
By “jam – Senior Wr….”, “The time is right for Drupal products“

It’s frustrating that competitors are still trying to pigeon-hole WordPress. The satisfying irony is that I expect WordPress’s use for non-blog sites is growing faster than the competitors.

Sure, we have biases. We are biases towards familiarity, usability, and not stressing people — letting people be awesome!

A leading example of what you can do with WordPress 3.0 CMS features is what CBS, with the help of VOCE Communications, have already created for nearing 200 CBS Radio and CBS Local properties. Sites like:

There are countless other examples, but a few have been cataloged at wordpress.org/showcase/tag/cms/

WordPress Activate Theme Action

Posted on by
8

There isn’t yet a WordPress activate theme hook. In the last week, it’s come up twice where WordPress.com Hosting VIP partners wanted some code to run once on theme activation.

It’s not an unusual scenario for our customers to create a new version of a theme, install it separately, and then activate it. Often this also allows reverting to the old version of the theme if something unexpected happens at launch.

In this scenario, it’s often easy to check for the existence of a new option, migrated, or other seed data, but sometimes you want to do something like:

global $pagenow;
if ( is_admin() && 'themes.php' == $pagenow && isset( $_GET['activated'] ) ) {
     // When theme is activated this code runs.
     // Still be defensive if you need to be, and check if
     // your baby is already born
}

Hat tip Frank Bültge.

Patents, Innovation Tax

Posted on by
1

So, what is [Intellectual Ventures] actually doing? Buying up loads of patents and licensing them to companies who calculate it’s not worth the fight is patent trolling 101. Yet the scale they’re operating on puts them on new ground, and opens new opportunities. It seems obvious to get corporate investors on board by promising them immunity from patent claims. With enough patents you stop trying to license them one-by-one and just tax each industry at some non-negotiable rate. No doubt they have more tricks I haven’t even thought of, but these potential devices really do make them a new breed of Super Trolls.

…

Now, I don’t really care if one company leeches off the others. But if they want to tax software, they have to attack free software otherwise people will switch to avoid their patent licensing costs. And if you don’t believe some useful pieces of free software could be effectively banned due to patent violations, you don’t think on the same scale as these guys.

Rusty Russell, “Superfreakonomics; Superplug for Intellectual Ventures.“, July 7th, 2010

I’m also opposed to software patents.

Watching Patent Absurdity: how software patents broke the system is time well spent.

Related Posts:

ShrimpTest Starts Rocking the A/B Testing

Posted on by
4

Mitcho has posted a 0.1 version of ShrimptTest, the A/B Testing Plugin for WordPress, and a brilliant video showing the results of his month working on it:

The plugin is already looking fantastic Mitcho style, and he’s just getting started!

Go to http://shrimptest.wordpress.com/ to download, try it out, and provide feedback.

“Clean and simple. It’s smash and grab.”

Posted on by
1

This is a hot button issue for me.

[U.S. Vice President Joe] Biden told reporters Thursday at a press conference in Washington, D.C. “But piracy is theft. Clean and simple. It’s smash and grab. It ain’t no different than smashing a window at Tiffany’s and grabbing [merchandise].”
Greg Sandoval, “Biden to file sharers: ‘Piracy is theft’“, cnet

What is “clean and simple” is

  • That’s propaganda.
  • Piracy happens on the high seas, or in Disney movies.
  • Nothing smashed nor grabbed. Property is a physical concept. There is no loss of property from copyright violations.
  • There is room for fair use.

I don’t recommend using or distributing works that you don’t have license to.

I do recommend getting involved in Free Culture and Open Source.

One of my great inspirations is Lawrence Lessig’s keynote presentation at the annual Open Source Convention (OSCON) made on July 24, 2002. My favorite parts are:

  • Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
  • The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
  • Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
  • Ours is less and less a free society.

ePub Wins, Consumer Win Next?

Posted on by
1

‘…the ePub format, which is open and freely available for any device, unlike the Kindle’s proprietary format, which functions only for Kindle. The ePub format is used by every electronic reader except the Kindle, and promises to be a big selling point for Google Editions, the search firm’s planned Web-based electronic bookstore scheduled to launch this summer, which will allow buyers to read books and much else on any number of devices. (This may include, by year’s end, Google’s own tablet computer.) It’s through ePub that readers have instant access to millions of books in the public domain, that electronic publishing has a chance to become standardized, and that writers will have more options when it comes to disseminating and selling their books. …’
Sue Halpern, “The iPad Revolution“, The New York Review of Books, June 10, 2010 (future date)

Photo of an e-reader inside the cut out of a paper book

Photo "Electronic Book" cc by-sa flickr user timonoko

e-text and e-books are topics I’ve been passionate about since ~1998 when Boris Mann tried to convince me that reading a book on a Palm Pilot could be an enjoyable experience — I never did get through more than a few chapters back then.

I’ve watched with fascination as audio, and then video, not text have migrated to digital. Although, writing has always been the main interface to computing, and digitization it is magnitudes smaller than the other medians, the reading experience has been much harder to improve upon than the listening and viewing experiences.

Fast forward to today and since Christmas (spoiled), I’ve read a half-dozen books on my Kindle 2. I’m already itching for better tech. I’m continuing to eye where publishing goes next, particularly the free culture implications

Sue Halpern’s whole article is excellent, and provides deep insights into e-reading, where the iPad fits in, and where e-books fit into Apple’s iPad business. Her essay is among the best I’ve read in a while: clear domain expertise, wide knowledge (open source shout out), objective, and excellent prose.

I emailed Sue, and she confirmed for me,

“DRM [(digital rights management) protected] books don’t go anywhere– yet. I think this will change when Google gets into the game. Right now epub on new books mainly benefits publishers, who don’t have to have books digitized in numerous formats in order to be read on various devices.”