A Fool’s Wisdom

Today, my hero Jeff Waugh wrote wp-hackers letting us know that GNOME has switched to WordPress µ for GNOME blogs, offering all members of the GNOME community (gnome.org email address) WordPress blogs.

Jeff’s mailing list message reads (emphasis mine):

Good morning freedom lovers,

Just a quick message to let you know that over the past few days GNOME has migrated from NewsBruiser (which basically stopped being maintained around the time we implemented it) to WordPress µ and the response from our users has been overwhelmingly positive. In many ways, WP and GNOME have very similar philosophical views on freedom, usability and tastefulness, so I’m happy we’re in good hands!

Thanks very much to all the WordPress and WPMU hackers! I hope some of the fixes and changes I’m working on can be a fitting return contribution.

http://blogs.gnome.org/

Thanks,

- Jeff (one of the duo who kicked off ‘Planet’, as it happens!)

Jeff (jdub)’s welcome post at blogs.gnome.org includes (again emphasis mine):

• Rocking user experience, built on the foundations of everybody’s favourite blogging tool, WordPress.
• All the mod cons you’d expect from WordPress: XMLRPC, APP, feeds, GUI editor, blogrolls, great management of pages, categories and comments.
• Some cool themes to start you off, including the beautifully stylesheetable Sandbox. You can apply your own CSS to any theme using the ‘Custom CSS’ page. Make your blog yours.
• Customisable sidebar widgets, and a few cool widget plugins to play with. Stick a Twitter or Flickr feed in your sidebar, let everyone know where you’re at.
• Not only have we maintained your Google-juice, we’ve enhanced it!

This is awesome! I extensively and passionately use Ubuntu GNOME!

There are 75 blogs registered in three days!

GNOMErs Pedro Villavicencio Garrido, Ray Strode, Xavier Claessens, Shreyas Srinivasan, Lucas Rocha, and many others seem to be enjoying it!

Is there a higher compliment than experience oriented, open-source-for-everyone participants using the software that you care about?

I am certain both projects will greatly benefit from this relationship!

2007-06-10 Update: WordPress lead developer Ryan Boren is also excited by this news, and shares that “[he] found out about WordPress through some GNOME developers” and had contributed to “GNOME before being consumed by WordPress full time”. If Matt Mullenweg and WordPress did not have similar values as GNOME, it seems unlikely that Ryan would have become involved.

2007-06-15 Update: Jeff’s blog has undergone a face lift. He posts on his own blog GNOME goes WordPress MU, “we’ve already managed to complete the virtuous circle: WordPress MU bug #352 was filed, fixed and shipped with WordPress MU 1.2.2 as a result of work on GNOME Blogs.”. He includes this awesome image:

“Tastes like freedom — and there’s more on the way!”