Category Archives: Free Culture

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.

Ubuntu Linux Still Searching Google

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Ubuntu has flim-flam-flapped back to Google for search.

Obviously, I think this is a good move. To recap switching to Yahoo for search would have alienated users because it’s a worse search engine, but more important would have overwritten people’s existing experience on upgrade.

In an email to the ubuntu-devel mailing list titled “Follow up to Default Search Provider Changes for 10.04” Rick Spencer writes:

Each release we determine the best default web browser and the best default search engine for Ubuntu. When choosing the best default search provider, we consider factors such as user experience, user preferences, and costs and benefits for Ubuntu and the browsers and other projects that make up Ubuntu. Up until Ubuntu 9.10 these defaults have always been Firefox and Google. Earlier in the 10.04 cycle I announced that we would be changing the default search provider to Yahoo!, and we implemented that change for several milestones.

However, for the final release, we will use Google as the default provider. I have asked the Ubuntu Desktop team to change the default back to Google as soon as reasonably possible, but certainly by final freeze on April 15th.

It was not our intention to “flap” between providers, but the underlying circumstances can change unpredictably. In this case, choosing Google will be familiar to everybody upgrading from 9.10 to 10.04 and the change will only be visible to those who have been part of the development cycle for 10.04.

All thanks the Ubuntu Masters!

Great Artists Still Steal

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Young great artists still steal.
Old great artists litigate?

I missed the news about the Apple-HTC Patent Lawsuit (Google Android) until tonight when I found out about it on Mark Jaquith’s blog.

I’m happy that these cards of Apple are finally on the table. I think Apple’s Multi-touch related patents have been hanging over the heads of other hardware and software developers.

I don’t think I’ve ever found myself agreeing with John Gruber more:

“No doubt some of you are nodding your heads and see this as justification for Apple’s suit. But life isn’t fair. Great ideas make the world better. Apple can rightly expect to benefit greatly from the ideas embodied by the iPhone, but they can’t expect to reap all of the benefits from those ideas.

That’s the nature of implementing insanely great ideas. The bar has been raised, and, yes, Apple did most of the lifting. That’s how it goes.”

John Gruber, “Daring Fireball: This Apple-HTC Patent Thing“, Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Right now people are in their venting phase. What comes next?

Is there an effective protest against the Apple-HTC patent lawsuit? Particularly something that Apple customers should do?

I can’t see enough people caring, particularly on the eve of the iPad.

May 5th quotes from the comments:

Ian wrote “I think Apple customers should use one finger at a time in protest.”

Mark wrote “Apple has to operate in the system as it exists.”

Terry — how can I just choose one of his tasty insights — wrote “I do think that holders of software patents should be forced to do some sort of licensing because of the chilling effect they’re having on innovation.”

Government for the People Makes You Special

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“It turns out that the International Intellectual Property Alliance, an umbrella group for organisations including the MPAA and RIAA, has requested with the US Trade Representative to consider countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India for its “Special 301 watchlist” because they use open source software.”

By Bobbie Johnson, “When using open source makes you an enemy of the state“, guardian.co.uk, Feb 23rd, 2010.

Canada is already “special”. We, Canadians, welcome these innovative countries!

WordPress 3 Coming Together

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The delirious pace of WordPress 3 development has been delicious!

I’ve enjoyed not being able to keep up at all.

The sprint is on to feature freeze!

There’s going to be a patch sprint of sorts for 3.0 this week. Please grab a ticket, triage, patch or test:http://core.trac.wordpress.org/report/32. The feature freeze is March 1, so everything still on that report in 7 days from now will be punted to a future release.

There are a few incomplete tasks out there that need to get done to finish implementing new features (both small ones on that report, and the major 3.0 features). If you’re interested in helping but aren’t sure where you can, venture over to #wordpress-dev.

Andrew Nacin on wpdevel, Feb 22th, 2010

Jane Wells puts up a “Patches Welcome” sign on a “a handful of small UI enhancement tickets that are low priority for the hardcore devs, but that I’d still like to see make it into 3.0.” Jane will “try to post a couple of pet tickets each day throughout the sprint week that is coming up.”

Better, stronger, faster blog network creation and management will be huge!

Mostly I can’t wait for the twenty ten theme, and the slow death of the (poorly) justified text that may have been the Kubrick themes only shortcoming.

PS. Emphasis above and below (bold) is all mine.

PPS. WordPress 3 will look so good in the title of the next technical book you write ;-)

Wednesday, Feb 23, 2010 Update: Jane has posted “Menus, the Merge, and a Patch Sprint!“ with details on the WordPress Development Blog, including the tidbit that WordPress 3 will have much improved menu management.

WordPress Declaration of Independence

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The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software.

The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the projects we support. People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base, that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come. As part of this mission, the Foundation will be responsible for protecting the WordPress, WordCamp, and related trademarks. A 501(c)3 non-profit organization, the WordPress Foundation will also pursue a charter to educate the public about WordPress and related open source software.

We hope to gather broad community support to make sure we can continue to serve the public good through freely accessible software.

About Web page, WordPress Foundation

There are already a lot of great comments on the welcome post “Getting off the ground“. Here is a one of the many juicy comments made by Matt in response to a question posted there:

Sure, as a quick summary: [Wordpress.com and the WordPress Foundation] completely separate, but share a similar name and my involvement. One is for-profit, the other non-profit. They both have similar goals in terms, but the Foundation can take a long-term multi-decade approach to solving these problems without regard for short term profit, market conditions, or shareholders. I’ve always had a vision for two simultaneous approaches to the WordPress way, the heart and the mind, but it’s just now coming together.

Versatile and Elegant, WordPress, Democratizing Publishing

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The combination of the elegant and versatile WordPress and the ground breaking Kubrick made that possible, turning the democratization of publishing from an idealized concept into a concrete reality.
Tina Daunt, “The Secret History of Kubrick, the Blog Theme That Changed the Internet“, Huffington Post, Jan 8th, 2010

Counterfeit Intellectual Property

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What’s interesting is that there’s clearly a collateral campaign underway to support ACTA by hammering on the wickedness of counterfeiting – allowing the bait and switch game to be played again. Here’s an example:

Canada trails far behind the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and France by not enacting tougher laws and penalties for selling imported bogus goods, an anti-counterfietting conference heard yesterday.

Lorne Lipkus, of the Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network, said a private members’ bill will soon lobby Parliament for expanded copyright laws, seizure rights similar to those that block suspected fake goods entering the U.S., plus heavier sentences for convicted sellers and importers.

The Toronto lawyer and conference organizer estimated Canadian manufacturers lose $20 to $30 billion and thousands of jobs to cheaper knockoffs.

We are warned against “knock-offs”: counterfeit goods are clearly knock-offs, but so, in the minds of the media cartel, are unauthorised copies of copyright material. The difference between counterfeit and copyright has been subtly elided. As a result, the solution demanded for this large-scale counterfeiting of goods – clearly *physical* goods – is “expanded copyright law”.

Glynn Moody, “The Great Digital Bait and Switch“, Dec 3rd 2009

And remember boys and girls, pirates dont’ steal copyrighted ink and bytes, they kill people or work for Disney.

The Clear Six Apart Open Web

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One of my inspirations Simon Willison, as well as his excellent deep analysis on numerous web development issues, provides pithy links and comments in from “elsewhere” on his blog. I highly recommend subscribing to his feed.

Today, he shared this quote from Anil Dash:

“It’s clear that, even those who are privileged by access and wealth and the ability to amplify their own voices have anticipated that we’ll all be disenfranchised by the private companies that own and control our networks of communication. And yet, most of our effort and ambition in the technology industry are not going towards building for the open web.”

Anil Dash, The Web in Danger, Nov 16th, 2009

Oh, how clear it is. As I commented on Simon’s post:

Anil is a VP at Six Apart.

Why do images on TypePad not have file name extensions?

Why are there no export features for Vox?

I could go on… I’ve emailed Anil Dash personally months ago about each of these issues. As has historically been the case with my interactions with Anil, I’ve only got hand waving back.

Here are the Get Satisfaction threads on those two issues:

This is something that gets me emotional. Even if Six Apart did not compete with us (WordPress/WordPress.com/Automattic) in some spaces, this issue is one of my emotional Achilles’ heels.

For all of their tooting about the open web, not only are Six Apart’s main services not open source projects, but they have long outstanding issues with locking in their customers.

Being able to get your content and data out is the greatest fundamental of the open web!

Update (later the same day): Announced today at Web 2.0 NYC, Anil is no longer employed by Six Apart. He is now Director of Expert Labs. I wish him all the best in his new job trying to effect change on the greatest scale.