Category Archives: Open Source

You Do Not Scale

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“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

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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…

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…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

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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

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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

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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.

Quake Commitment

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For those software developers and companies where open source doesn’t quite fit their business plan, how about a Quake Commitment?

“In conjunction with his self-professed affinity for sharing source code, John Carmack has open-sourced most of the major id Software engines under the GPL license. Historically, the source code for each engine has been released once the code base is 5 years old.”
Wikipedia article: id Software

Blurred Computer Commands in Green on a Black Screen

Photo "cmd.exe" cc by-sa flickr user n3wjack

I think this is a novel approach, and I’m surprised that I haven’t heard of any other companies making this sort of commitment. Fellow open source zealots would warm up to you and you’d earn the love of developer communities everywhere. It also increases the chance that your software has a greater legacy.

Let me know if you’re committing to opening the source of aged versions of your proprietary software. Will it be 2, 3 or some other length of years from now?

Great Lineup for WordCamp SF Genius Bar Help Desk!

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I just posted the WordCamp SF 2010 Genius Bar Help Desk schedule.

Like previous years, I’m really excited about these amazing people so generously sharing their WordPress expertise one on one!

The WordCamp Genius Bar came about when myself and other WordPress participants felt regret for not being able to answer all of the excellent questions people were stopping us in the hall with at the first WordCamp (2006, has it really been 5 years). For WordCamp SF 2007, WordCamp Genius Bar was born, and has continued every year since with the help of Maya, Elea and numerous genius volunteers. It has become an ingredient in the WordCamp formula, the most potent batches anyway.