Where 100% and fully are not quite the definitions I’m used to.1
Yes, Movable Type Open Source should be celebrated! It is awesome that it already includes everything that was released as Movable Type 4.0 and more. As I understand it there should soon be a stable release. But I am confused by the conversations I read and concerned by the phrases used to describe this “version”.
People ask all the time what is the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com. Or they are confused for good reason why they can’t do something they heard about on one or other. But this is a confusion that is easily cleared:
- WordPress.org is open source blogging software that is freely available to download. The software must be downloaded and installed.
- WordPress.com is a web site that hosts blogs free of charge.
After explaining that, people nod their head in understanding, “OK, I get it now”.
I suspect there is little head nodding when it comes to Movable Type branding and open source, although you might think otherwise based on the phrases in these quotes (emphasis mine):
- Six Apart Vice President of Evangelism Anil Dash, “As of today, and forever forward, Movable Type is open source.“
- Tom Keating, “Movable Type has gone 100% open source“
- Jeremy Zawodny, “As a long-time user of Movable Type, I’m glad to see it going fully Open Source now.“
- Mark Jaquith, Movable Type is now Free for any purpose, under the same license used for WordPress“
Based on those quotes, I would think that Movable Type is as open source as [insert funny though vulgar comparison].
Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. There is a Movable Type that isn’t open source. The product Movable Type by itself is reserved for their commercial product2 , and it sounds like there will be lots of effort to redifferentiate the proprietary product.
Will proprietary Movable Type complete with Movable Type open source? Assuming MT is re-embraced by open source participants, on Six Aparts current path, I think it is inevitable.
No, Cory I think the jury is still out on whether Six Apart is “adopted a [open source] license: because they want to promote freedom”, and that it is ok with me and should be with most everyone else. Movable Type Product Manager Byrne Reese suggests they did it for distribution. Freedom is a spectrum and different freedoms are important to different people, and Six Apart has always demonstrated being awesome in supporting many freedoms!
Saturday, Jan 26th Update: a surprisingly timely release of a stable version of MTOS after my post and this discussion, and updates to the web site, it seems that Byrne and the Six Apart team agree with me at least on some level. Though I don’t like my open source in flavors, I feel comfortable declairing Movable Type only 120% open source now.
Sat, Feb 9th Update: see comment 29 below with some quotes from Six Apart professionals expressing their confusion about Movable Type open source flavor.
- The title of the post is a play on 200% of Nothing
by A. K. Dewdney
- Movable Type Product Manager Byrne Reese, [MTOS-dev] Welcome to MTOS-dev [↩]
35 Comments
Anil Dash gave me the impression that differentiation between the two would be incidental. It didn’t sound to me like they were going to be stuffing MT with a bunch of in-house features and then withholding them from MTOS. I would imagine they’d get flak for treating MTOS like a second class citizen. I guess we’ll see what happens. Anil indicated that licensing flexibility was the important thing. For instance, they could allow someone to integrate MT into a BSD-licensed project. Or, it could allow them to offer MTOS in a GPL 3.0′d version.
And while there will likely be some cannibalization (MT users go to MTOS), having MTOS out there Free could expand the user base and the theme/plugin market, making MT more appetizing to pro users who want support from Six Apart.
And funny you should mention wordpress.org/wordpress.com confusion… I have a blog draft pending on that subject for which you might have some good counterpoints.
I’m not sure how this post helps more people start blogging, or helps WordPress users, or helps MT users, but here it is so I might as well respond. There’s a weird sense you’re looking for a gotcha here, by linking to various comments or emails and taking little parts out of context, but basically, we do the same thing as nearly every other commercially-backed open source development project: We add paid software, support and services to the core platform and charge for them, to fund development. You might recognize this model; It’s how you get your paycheck. So yep, we (and many others) offer paid products that work with Movable Type.
You ask, “Will proprietary Movable Type complete [sic] with Movable Type open source?” Do you feel that MySQL “competes” with itself by being dual-licensed? Berkeley DB? Asterisk? To my mind, it’s very clear: We have a range of options for people to choose from, and the licenses make it very clear that you can opt for whatever you prefer based on the costs and benefits, not an arbitrary restriction of a license.
You also point out that we reserve the commercial use of our trademarked product name for our own product, which is again, just like what your employer does. Do you really think the jury is out on whether we want to promote freedom, after we’ve not just said so, but *demonstrated* it ourselves?
Honestly, it seems like your goal here is to be petty and nitpicky, not to do something that helps any part of the blogging community, or that helps anybody make better software or have more good choices. I hope that’s not the case, because that’d be lame. If you (or Mark, for that matter) are conflicted about the fact that you both claim to support open source, yet tear down those who actually open up their code while working for employers that make money on proprietary code, I can’t help you.
Anil, what you see as nit picks many people in the open source community feel are very important details. The goal of the article should be clear: identification of the confusion around Movable Type and the opportunity to eliminate that confusion. That is to the benefit of open source, your customers, and your organization. There are further opportunities for your organization, but based on your response, I’m not inclined to share them.
Please do correct me if I am mistaken, but dual-licensing isn’t what you are doing. Some code is dual licensed, but other code is not. So your comparison to MySQL, Berkeley DB, and Asterisk is incorrect. That is exactly Movable Type’s problem.
Succinctly, MT *is* dual-licensed. We have software packs that we sell on top of that which come with support and additional features, and those are not under OSI licenses. This is, in fact, what companies like MySQL do as well. We also sell paid services on top of the core platform, some of which is based on proprietary software, just as you do.
You say, “The goal of the article should be clear: identification of the confusion around Movable Type and the opportunity to eliminate that confusion.” I have not yet seen any confusion in this regard, save that which your post seems to be designed to create — if there are links to people legitimately confused over this, I’d love to see them.
Myself and many open source participates would disagree with you. Because of my work on Flock, a Firefox derivative, I’m very familar with dual-licensing, and succintly [sic] MT is not. “Dual-licensing is the practice of distributing identical software under two different sets of terms and conditions.” The key word is *identical*.
You say Movable Type is open source. I go to http://www.movabletype.org/ . Open Source is a separate tab and clicking there I’m at a different product. From here clicking download first suggests that I probably want the proprietary Movable Type. That there is a release candidate for the proprietary product, but not for the open source product doesn’t smell right.
Ok, back to MySQL, which you have called out as a comparison — which may not be a great one because it isn’t a consumer product. I go to http://www.mysql.com/, I click download and I’m presented with their two offerings, the first point for MySQL Community edition is “My own method of keeping my systems up to date and am comfortable upgrading and configuring MySQL.” Whether I went with either edition, the MySQL software is identical as you can see at http://www.mysql.com/products/which-edition.html . Even if I got MySQL through any other distribution channel (which Byrne suggests is a primary motivator for MTOS), say my favorite Linux distribution Ubuntu or a Mac OS X open source software packaging project like Fink, I get *identical* MySQL software. Yes, their Enterprise edition has additional features, but those are outside of the core experience, and I can fluidly move between the two.
You can have Movable Type proprietary or you can Movable Type open source, but you can’t have it both way. The confusion is solved by adding a term to the proprietary edition, or when describing the open source product always explicitly calling out the product “version”.
As I said in my article, I’m incredibly excited that there is Movable Type Open Source!
I certainly didn’t intend to tear anything down. What I wrote in September was only intended to highlight and clarify the issues of copyright attribution, code flow from other GPL projects, and the ability for Six Apart to multi-license MT. I wasn’t pronouncing judgement on these things, merely noting the ramifications. I’m quite happy about MTOS.
At first I also thought he was referring to you, because you are one of the main Marks in my life. But no, Anil is referring to Mark Pilgrim.
Ah! That makes much more sense.
Yep, sorry for the mixup and my unnecessarily strident tone. I still honestly haven’t heard anyone say they’re confused, and I haven’t seen any similar efforts to “clarify” the product strategy of any other similar projects, so I will stand by my belief that, if this was intended as constructive criticism, it could well have been handled as a private email asking for clarification. The “praise publicly, criticize privately” theory has worked well for every other company I’ve interacted with in the blogging space, having been on both the sending and receiving ends many times.
Lloyd, I think you are right to point out that users could be confused by the difference between Movable Type Open Source and Movable Type Commercial, for obviously the same reasons Wordpress’ users may sometimes get confused by wp.com vs. wp.org.
So for those people who have read this far down the thread, let me attempt to bring some clarity to what all the various MT versions are and mean:
* MTOS (Movable Type Open Source) is a version or “distribution” (which is a term I prefer) available under the GPL (v2). This version is free in every sense of the word. Users can download it for free, redistribute it for free, make changes for free, yadda yadda yadda - provided of course that they apply by the rules of the GPL.
* Movable Type for Personal Use is a distribution of Movable Type that is 100% identical to MTOS from a code perspective, however it is released under a proprietary license. Naturally this leads the question, “but why?” A question I will answer in a moment.
So, as you can see, Anil is right: Movable Type is unambiguously dual licensed. Period.
* Movable Type for Commercial Use is a distribution of Movable Type that includes the dual licensed version of the core open source product AND additionally includes the Professional Pack that contains features exclusive to our paid customers. Granted, we could distribute just the “Professional Pack” since technically it can be deployed on top of any version of Movable Type similar to how a plugin is installed, however, we wanted to ensure that installation was a simple process for our users, so we bundle MT 4.1 and the Professional Pack together in one download so our users only have to download and install one thing, not two.
* All the other distributions of Movable Type, Community and Enterprise Solution for example, follow the same model as the Commercial Use distribution, or “version.”
They all contain a version of the core product, plus a few add ons (or plugins) that introduce additional functionality. Technically an “add on” is not the same as a “plugin” but from a user perspective they are indistinguishable.
We work hard to try and make it as simple as possible, so I appreciate your seeking clarification. Hopefully I have succeeded in clarifies how we package Movable Type.
Oh, and as for the follow up answer I promised…
Why have a closed and open source version of the same software?
The answer is actually pretty simple: first, when embarking on this whole licensing change we spoke with customers first - many expressed a preference to keep using a proprietary version of MT. Since it costs us nothing and makes our customers happy, we kept the personal use license. But there is actually another compelling reason: the economics of support.
Having provided paid support directly to our customers for years now, we have learned that the costs associated with providing support for a user powering a personal blog versus a user powering their company’s web site or intranet are different.
Because MTOS allows a user to use Movable Type for any purpose under the sun, it makes it very hard for us to maintain the integrity of our pricing model around support, that is priced based upon the inherently different costs associated with the various sizes of deployment our users have.
So for *now* we decided to only sell support for our proprietary licenses because we already have a system in place to support that. Of course in the future we may choose to expand upon our support services (and consequently expand our team to meet the almost certain increase in demand) around offering paid support for the open source version of Movable Type.
Anil, I have tried to get your assistant on issues previously by email. With those issues you also described not having heard similar concerns, where multiple mutual customers said they had raised the issues with Six Apart — likely the concerns weren’t articulated to you, but it surprises me you weren’t able to find information about them. Those issues remain unaddressed.
As previously, I find you bring up a lot of different issues, and obtuse in your arguments: “…the product strategy of any other similar projects…”. I would prefer that you did not comment on my blog.
Byrne, this is wonderful news! The experience at http://movabletype.com/ , http://www.movabletype.org/ , and http://www.movabletype.org/opensource/ would benefit from such clarity. Particularly as it relates to what features differentes them. If the experience is different because of those features, trust me that you will have many disheartened open source participants — that is the crux of my issue and article.
Why is there a RC for MT 4.1 Commercial, but not a “stable release” of MTOS?
“Why is there a RC for MT 4.1 Commercial, but not a “stable release” of MTOS?”
Man power. I am the guy right now behind the curtain orchestrating the public side of the beta. Well, that is not entirely true, Chris Hall is also heavily involved in responding personally to every single issue reported to us. But generally speaking I was concerned about how well we could effectively conduct multiple betas, when in essence the betas would have been for the same product. So I personally chose to conduct a beta for the superset of all features, the commercial product.
Luckily that has not been a hindrance to all of MTOS users who have reported issues to us, nor has it been a problem for the multitude of people who have submitted contributions to us.
Even in retrospect I am not sure we made the wrong decision. After all, we did achieve our objective of getting a lot of users involved, we recruited more users to the platform, we demonstrated all of the features found in a paid product in a free and open beta, and we improved quality across the board for all of our products. All in all, a pretty good deal.
Of course this level of efficiency is only possible because MTOS and MT 4.1 truly are just the same piece of software licensed in two different ways. Let’s see, don’t they have a term for that? Oh yeah, it’s “dual licensed.”
Just kidding — I just couldn’t help myself.
I hope you don’t mind if I take my comment and fold it into our documentation - you are right: we could always improve on making things clearer, simpler and better. Always.
Byrne Reese
Product Manager, Movable Type
Byrne, your jokes would be funnier if your sites were at least as clear in this regard. It sounds like you are confirming the very issue I present. You write “superset of all features” and then later write “MTOS and MT 4.1 truly are just the same piece of software”. Only one of those statements can be true. As I wrote, if the experience is different because of those features, trust me that you will have many disheartened open source participants.
Regarding choosing to do a beta for the commercial product before the long promised open source product, I hope you see how that is a hindrance to adoption and distribution of Movable Type Open Source and open source in general. From a quality assurance standpoint the approach is also backwards.
Aside, “man power” is a sexist term. I also catch myself using such discriminator language, because particularly in software and hardware development the participants and language are very predominately male.
/man/person/gmi — mea cupla
That’s “mea culpa”
A question, is not Six Apart’s strategy by selling value packs on top of the core (OS) platform the same as selling commercial licenses for Akismet (a plugin, thus a value pack) on top of a core (OS) platform?
Arvind, thanks for commenting! I think that is a fair question, and a fair way to look at it.
Many people have rejected our anti-spam Akismet offering because it isn’t open source. I’m not directly involved in Akismet. I appreciate Matt’s argument that it isn’t appropriate to make open source, because it would compromise the approach used by it, and therefore the service. I’ve heard Matt speak to this issue many times, and it genuinely seems to pain him that it isn’t open source.
Perhaps the architecture of Akismet just doesn’t lend itself to being open sourced because it isn’t modular enough?
Certainly there could be a way to open source Akismet as a framework for processing comments without compromising the security, privacy and integrity of those components that provide the real value?
Hi Byrne, that might be the case, but since Matt is well known for keeping code simple and not getting sucked in to OOP, etc, when it isn’t appropriate, I would be surprised if complexity — which I think is the fundamental issue you are alluding to — is a motivator for why it isn’t open source. I would also be surprised if there where any novel solutions outside of the comment analysis engine.
Is processing a high volume of comments a tricky solution? It sounds very similar to a lot of other well known problems with solutions. Can hardware reasonably be thrown at the problems? Anyway, it isn’t really my interest, but I’m sure that Matt, Barry, and team would be happy to participant in those conversations and share code.
It feels like this converation is moving away from the topic of my article, but I’d be interested in reading the articles on your own blogs.
Whispers: Don’t be afraid of the fluidity of this discussion - embrace it.
That is not what I am alluding to at all. My guess is that it is not open source because revealing the heuristics behind Akismet’s spam detection would subvert the very purpose of the service.
My point is this: if my assumption about the reason Akismet remains closed is correct, then there are ways you could architect Akismet, without it ever becoming complex BTW, that allow you to open up the framework without compromising the core service’s ability to fight spam.
Then you provide the value of allowing others to add value to the framework by developing their own techniques for fighting spam - that you can optionally fold into the framework. Movable Type works this way - by allowing comments to pass through multiple spam detection filters to determine collectively if a comment is spam. Perhaps a similar architecture would benefit Akismet. Then you have the added benefit of saying that Akismet is open source as opposed to having to defend why it is not.
Just my 2 cents.
Byrne, sorry, I’m not really following you.
Akismet of course has a client and server component. It is a separate plugin, but included in the core WordPress package. I assume you know the client code like all code shipped with WordPress or pluigns hosted at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ is GPL v2.
It is the server side, the service, that isn’t open source, which as you sugest Matt believes revealing the comment analysis engine would subvert its very purpose. Sounds reasonable to me.
It sounds like WordPress and MT are similar in allowing comments to pass through multiple spam detection filters. As far as I know all areas of WordPress are flexible in this way with filters and actions.
My understand is the plugin architecture or framework is one of earlier features that attracted developers, and continues to be one of people’s favorite features — keep the core general, but highly extensible.
WP’s handling of comment spam determinations is a handing down of a three-way switch. Spam, Moderate, Approve are the three options, and that status is handed down the line to whatever plugins want to hook in and manipulate it. So while you can have multiple things making determinations, the final determination is up to the last thing in line. And there is no mechanism for communicating the reasons (or even the agents) of changes earlier in the line. That makes it hard for plugins to communicate. Spam Karma 2 gets around this by instituting its own plugin system. As far as WP is concerned, SK2 is making the sole determination, and then there is communication within SK2 between its various modules (including an Akismet module). SK2 is not open source though, and is too complicated for general use. I think there is some room for WP to become more flexible in this area, although the implementation would have to be such that it doesn’t present a huge configuration/maintenance hurdle to users. I’ve been talking about such a system on and off for several years. Akismet partially obviated the need for such a change because it quickly became as effective as hand-tweaked complicated setups like SK2. Akismet is a nice solution because it doesn’t require a bunch of configuration or maintenance.
Of course, this hypothetical change would be a change in WP, not Akismet. The only way Akismet could become more flexible is to provide its internal scoring (I’m assuming it has some non-binary method of keeping score internally, even though its external scoring is thumbs up/down.) But that runs the risk of providing spammers with quality feedback they could use to make a more detailed map of Akismet’s defenses.
Hi Lloyd, that wasn’t quite the question I was asking.
You criticize Six Apart because the Movable Type product (as opposed to MTOS) remains proprietary. The core platform between the two is, however, identical (in fact, right now, the only differentiator between the open source and commercial versions of MT are the support contracts and packs that come with it, which are closed source). I liken this to Automattic’s distribution of Akismet (which is closed source, the plugin may be OS but that’s hardly useful) and charging a commercial license for it (and I believe Automattic also offers support contracts for a price too). How are the two different that you so harshly criticize your competitor?
I understand that Wordpress observes a plugin architecture and that it allows multiple agents to process incoming comments. And I know it is open source. What I am talking about are the CLOSED parts of Akismet: mainly the server component.
So, to rephrase, what I am saying is that the Akismet Server could be architected in a similar manner as WP and MT. In other words, I could download the Akismet Server product and install it on a web server. By itself it may do very little and apply on the most basic spam tests to incoming comments. But then I could also download and install on my server a number of Akismet Server plugins that apply the spam detection heuristics to which I refer. Finally I could then point my Akismet client/plugin at my own privately hosted Akismet server/service.
This would allow developers then to develop custom spam detection algorithms and share them back to Automattic, or a larger spam fighting consortium.
If all software is indeed better if it is open source, then that rule must also apply to the software that powers Akismet. Therefore, if Akismet is closed source, then it is made so by choice in spite of the very principals that say it would better if it were open.
Byrne, thanks for rephrasing it. It greatly helps confirm that I think I did previously understand your first comment in this discussion, and now I will try rephrasing my response in the hope we come to mutual understanding.
Akismet is the comment analysis engine. I don’t imagine it would help customers of Akismet if there was an installable Akismet Server that just called the remote service, but I don’t see any hinderance to someone already doing that by using the client API in their own spam web server or service.
As I wrote I would be surprised if there was anything novel about what the casing around the comment analysis engine looked like, but if there is I’m sure Matt, Barry, and team would share it.
As I wrote about Matt has made it clear that in this case he doesn’t that open source is appropriate, so it is clear that he doesn’t think all software is indeed better if it is open source. I don’t have the expertise to understand the problem and solutions.
Arvind, based on the surprisingly timely release of a stable version of MTOS after my post and this discussion, and updates to the web site, it seems that Byrne and the Six Apart team agree with me at least on some level.
WordPress is open source. There is no flavor that isn’t open source. All of the experience is open source, except you are correct that the reality is spam protection is an essential part of the blogging experience.
I greatly look forward to excellent spam protection that is open source! I’m just not confident that is practical today, but as I wrote I don’t have any expertise in that area.
based on the surprisingly timely release of a stable version of MTOS after my post and this discussion [...] it seems that Byrne and the Six Apart team agree with me at least on some level.
I only ask this because I’ve pretty much convinced myself I had to have read this incorrectly and stopped drafting my original response: Are you actually implying that the stable MTOS build was in some way influenced/brought about by this post as opposed to always planned and possibly delayed for whatever reason?
I’m sorry but you’re kidding, right? Six Apart has discussed this strategy on ProNet (a mailing list I am positive you are a member of since I remember a few posts from you) several times and they have only played it out recently.
Sorry, I don’t follow ProNet closely, but of course I appreciate that they have always been working towards a stable release — I was excited for the release, but I don’t understand the length of time it took for software of this nature to be open sourced and the delays I don’t feel were communicated well. To put this in perspective Netscape, magnitudes upon magnitudes more complex, source code was open sourced within a few months after announcement.
But thankfully here we have it it. A week ago there was no release candidate for MTOS, although from a quality assurance standpoint it would have been made sense to do that before or at the same time as a RC for MT.
And now the web sites are that much better in terms of presenting the open source flavor and clarifying the differences.
Whether I really influenced them or not, I’m happy with the result.
Though there is still strides they can make if they are serious about freedom in the open source sense, and because of that even if I wasn’t and never had been employed to work on WordPress, I know that MT wouldn’t be an option in this competitive environment where there is no point to sacrifice the freedom of the experience or the code. Things like this are just enough to tip the scales against MT.
I have participated in and promote open source long before WordPress, and I chose WordPress long before I knew the community, and far before being paid to participate.
Jan 31, Six Apart CEO Chris Alden started a discussion on Six Apart’s ProNet mailing list titled “update on MT pricing“. There couldn’t have been better examples of the confusion regarding Movable Type and open source if someone had tried to orchestrate it, and the responses are from profession web developers (emphasis mine):
Jesse Gardner wrote, “Get rid of the dual licensing of MT4.1 and an MTOS. Since Chris just confirmed that the code is the same no matter what the license is, all that people are really paying for is support. So why don’t we just call it that instead of confusing people? … Byrne mentioned to me that supporting MTOS would be a nightmare given it’s fluidity. But follow my logic: if the “real product” and the “open source” version were one-and-the-same (which they are now from a code standpoint)”
Mark Carey wrote, ‘I assume that the current “OSS License” vs “Commercial License” terminology stems not from the actual business model (which effectively is “you pay for these addons and support is included as long as you are on a stable version of the core”), but from the legal considerations surrounding warranties, supporting non-stable OSS versions, etc. These are valid concerns, of course, but the result is a confusing way of describing it.’
Doug Schaefer wrote, ‘We keep being told that MT is MT is MT. However, when I go to download I see that I can get, on one page [1], MT free for personal use. On another page [2], I see that I get get MTOS for free too. Each download is a different zip file. Different download pages, different zip files lead me to believe that they are, well, different. Maybe they aren’t, but you’d be hard pressed to tell from the web site.‘
LaRosa Johnson wrote, ‘I think that’s part of the issue though. “Right now” MT 4.1 & MTOS are the same, but that may not hold true in the future because 6A could decide to take the commercial product in one direction, while MTOS could do something completely different, considering it is more community driven.’
I guess Anil instead of attacking me by writing “confusion [...] save that which your post seems to be designed to create”, he should have been working on solving the problem. Byrne (and team?) have worked valiently to document and communicate the different Movable Types, but as I have described, from an open source perspective, these are flawed offerings.
Not quite. Communicator was partially released as open-source because parts where licensed from third-parties. What code that was open-sourced couldn’t even build.By October 1998, they scrapped all of the code in favour of building around NGLayout (later Gecko). It took them until mid-2002 to release a “functional” browser, Mozilla 1.0. Then Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross branched Gecko to build what was to become Firefox 1.0 in late 2004.
Netscape may have open sourced soon after the announcement but it took them years to have a competitive browser. IMO, it took over 6 years. Firefox is now a first-class browser, but you might have been forgiven for not thinking that it would ever become one when Netscape open-sourced the spaghetti that made up Communicator.
Six Apart stumbled out of the starting gate but I’m willing to give them a chance to redeem themselves. MySQL had done quite well with dual licensing, maybe Six Apart can make a go of it too.
huxley, the code did build and run. Not well, but it did. Although some core components were scrapped, much of the code I have worked with in Mozilla shows evolution from the original open sourced code.
Although, there is no such thing as bad open source, the disappointment for me that Six Apart continues to stumble. I will try to find time to write up a new article just focusing on solutions for them.
Hey boys and girls! Just wanted to drop in, say hello, and express my sadness that you didn’t actually get to “follow my logic” from the hamstrung quote Lloyd so concisely shared from our private mailing list. How about the whole thing in context?
Oh, and the discussion it generated was great!
Jesse, thanks for commenting! I hesitated to post your comment without asking you to modify it, because of the term “hamstrung”, as the meaning I’m familiar with may have suggests a personal attack, but decided to post it as you wrote it, because the richness of your comment was lost in my quoting, but not as it related to this article. I’m glad that you found my quoting concise. I agree you present what seems like a wonderful model to be included in Six Apart’s business!
Byrne, I’m really disappointed how you presented “Appropriate?“, and that no members of the list challenged the personal attacks against my character, the character of the Automattic team or the WordPress community. I won’t participate in a hostile environment.
I had previously had a lot of respect for Timothy Appnel, but was really hurt when he wrote something so absurd as, “Interesting yes, but still not surprised. Clearly the tone was set, condoned and fueled by the staff from the beginning. I guess we’re only starting to see them be up front about it because all those millions they just took on the back of open source has made them cocky.”
My writing on this issue has little to do with WordPress, and everything to do with my 10+ years participating in open source.
Calling the list private still seems incorrect to me, and I’m certain that many other netizens would disagree with you, and I don’t recall any documentation that supports it. As I wrote, “If it is private, you will want to update http://www.sixapart.com/mailman/listinfo/pronet”
Skot Nelson’s wrote
And then goes on to personally attack me.
The restaurant analogy doesnt’ work for me, because all mailing lists are hosted on private property. What makes it a public list is that anyone can join and participate.
I am surprised that Tim thinks “members post with understanding that they are not public”.
Archives that require someone to log in to view them, isn’t a property that can be used to establish a list as private because private archives has long been used by lists to reduce spam to the participants.
If the list is meant to be private, it should explicitly be documented. End of story.
It is really sad that no one on the list challenges Michael De Soto’s misunderstanding of what open source is when he wrote “Open source simply means the source is code distributed in a readable and modifiable way. I.E. not compiled. I.E. Movable Type from day one.”
Open source has a clear definition. The code being readable and modifiable is essential but not sufficient for something to be open source as I wrote recently in “Open Source Free Web Site Templates without the Open Source” established over many years and the definition will not be easily subverted, if myself and the rest of the open source communities can do anything about it.
Ian Fenn provides great general insights:
And so ends my test of the maximum size you can make a WordPress comment.
My email to ProNet was in no way derogatory, inflammatory or in anyway negative. I simply asked the community a question in a hopes for it, the community, to define more clearly what its expectations around privacy were, since there was clearly an ambiguity.
Oh, in my super comment, I forgot to address the accusation of taking the comments I include in Comment #29 out of context. I still feel that is the case. None of the people that brandished that accusation on the list has provided an example of that — even better would be also an example of how to do write it without taking it out of context.