“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“.

“Free and open source from the roots up. “Open source” can be much more than a development methodology. For me, it also constitutes a world view that upends institutionalized notions of competitive advantage that saw their apex in the twentieth century.”

Excerpt from Paul Kim‘s “Why I Joined Automattic” published September 9, 2009.

Freedom by Abnel Gonzalez, CC by, Flickr Hosted

I’ve come to think of the people who build open source and free culture into their businesses as not only having the creativity and resolve to put their values at the core of their businesses, but also the foresight and humility to know that the future is always built on the past, that the future is outside of their control, but possibly not their contribution.

This is one of the main reasons I so enjoy working with Matt Mullenweg, Toni Schneider, the rest of the Automattic crew, and the WordPress.com VIPs and WordPress businesses I get to so regularly interact with. I’m ecstatic that Paul has joined us!

Taking a Matt Nap

In “The Way I Work, annotated” my boss Matt Mullenweg shares additional insights and linkifies his Inc. Magazine’s “The Way I Work” column (July issue). Both versions are excellent reads, but the post at ma.tt benefits from Matt answering a lot of additional questions in the comments.

Here is an excerpt from the article that inspired me to share this photo (emphasis mine):

“I do my best work mid-morning and super late at night, from one to five in the morning. Some people don’t need sleep, but I actually need a ton. I just sleep all the time, catching naps in the afternoon or a 20-minute snooze in the office. Our business is 24 hours — folks in Australia start their day around 4 PM my time and our guys and girls in Europe get going around midnight. Sometimes I’ll go out at night, come home from the bar at 2 or 3 AM, and then go back to work.”

If you are interested, let me know and we can set up a private blog on WordPress.com for you to import into. Bonus is that you will have a backup of your blog ready to go live if anything ever befalls TypePad.

This importer wouldn’t be possible without the heroic effort Ronald Heft Jr put into creating a TypePad AtomPub importer for WordPress — it’s not his fault TypePad still doesn’t have a way to export your full blog.

What’s an AtomPub? While working on this importer Noel contacted TypePad support only to have them tell him they don’t know what AtomPub is, and that they don’t support it.

Anyway, as I said, if you are a TypePad customer, and want to participate in open source development by testing this exporter, or would just like a backup of your blog ready to launch on WordPress.com, leave a comment or send me an email.

If I wasn’t clear my video really is in no way a comment of the MT Pro product — I’ve never tried it. All the Six Apart teams are clearly very talented, so I’m sure it’s a great product. Though I’m pretty sure it won’t live up to “setting social networking free”.

Let’s break it down:

focus more on telling a story

People that know me, know that I’m all about the story that a product tells, and I think their video failed in the very way that he thinks they succeeded. I didn’t see a compelling story about the experience of Movable Type Pro. As my voice-over reflects, I saw a story that looked like any blogging platform and comments.

Both of us are extremely biased at opposites ends of the spectrum, so neither of us will get it right on this one. I would love to know the results of a diverse group of people each separately watching the video and sharing their reactions.

Honestly, we assume that that everyone else on the web will respond by copying great ideas, as they usually do. Hell, we want them to, so that more people can benefit from open communities on the web.

If you are familiar with Anil’s writing, you may end up with the conclusion, like I have, that he is actually obsessed with being first — or that is one of the SIx Apart key messages anyway. Maybe, it all started because he was Six Apart’s first employee. Check out the Movable Type blog, “A WordPress 2.5 Upgrade Guide” [sic] article for a bit of a taste. If you enjoy the flavor, a Google search will lead you across the Web.

Of any software spaces, blogging is one of the richest for borrowing from each other and providing a consistent experience to customers — everyone benefits from this! I’d like to think WordPress has had as many firsts as any blogging platform, but even if that isn’t the case, I’m much more interested in focusing on doing it well. An example is the TypePad iPhone app was an iPhone launch partner, but the WordPress iPhone app is much more popular, has more reviews, and is higher rated, and we are still busy fixing and improving it.

Until then, they’ve created a parody of our video.

So me spending a couple hours playing around with iMovie in my own time (my 1st time using it), somehow becomes the Automattic answer to MT Pro?! And as I mentioned, no link love, no mention of my name (Lloyd Budd) — very, very bad blogger etiquette. Is iMovie that good that Anil thinks it’s a first rate production? I don’t think so, listening to it again, it is clearly the crap job that I remember doing for my own amusement.

without having your it look like another Facebook or MySpace clone

Did I voice-over the wrong video? I’m pretty sure it was their video that started with Digg, Facebook and MySpace. I might have misspoke, but I thought it would be obvious that I was referring to having social features beyond commenting like those platforms.

Our long-held reputation for publishing highly scalable, “Digg-proof” pages.

That is one of Anil’s favorite sound bites. I know Anil can’t seriously be suggesting that a file based “cache” is a whole solution to being highly scalable.

The funny part is that substitute in WordPress and you have at least an equally true assertion, ‘[WordPress's] long-held reputation for publishing highly scalable, “Digg-proof” pages.’ The reason why this sometimes looks not to be true is because of WordPress’s popularity.

I would bet, with no hesitation, that WordPress sites are far more often dugg, and that unfortunately some of those sites dugg, like my own, are on inexpensive, shared hosted environments that aren’t Digg ready.

For most WordPress customers the dynamic, responsive experience is far more important than “Digg-proof”, but for those that do want to prepare for a digg storm, there are high quality plugins like Super Cache and Batcache and many others that suit your specific configuration and needs.

There is no question that WordPress is scalable, fact is WordPress powers far more of the web than Movable Type, both in terms of web pages served and web sites. Fact is Movable Type doesn’t even power Six Apart’s hosted TypePad, and to my great frustration is incompatible in numerous ways — wonder why there is no Movable Type app for iPhone anyone?

remedy some of the missing features in WordPress if you have enough free time to find the appropriate plugins

Talking out the other side of his face, Anil will point out Movable Type’s rich plugin and theme collection. I’m pretty sure, Pro has even been presented as plugins built on top of MT at one time — bundling.

Of course, there is a huge collection, much larger, of WordPress plugins and themes, and I haven’t heard complaints that it’s hard to find the appropriate plugin. The wordpress.org/extend/plugins gives you information about popularity, and the interface will continue to evolve.

This past weekend, during Matt’s “State of the Word” at WordCamp SF 2008 (video will be online soon!), spoke to how that experience will change and how the actually WordPress plugin usage data will directly help WordPress evolve, with top plugins are polished and integrated into WordPress.

prominent independent security researchers do warn, “[T]he abysmal security practices of WordPress plugin developers places the entire Internet at risk”.

Why pick on the plugin developers brother?

That’s on top of WordPress being one of top ten least secure applications around

Each of the most popular blogging and CMS made the list, as does Linux.

the Department of Homeland Security’s data showing WordPress having twelve times as many reported security vulnerabilities as Movable Type

Should I even touch this one? Since Anil discovered that Home Land Security site I think that has become his favorite. I think it’s more telling that the Department of Homeland Security, and many other US government offices use WordPress (conversation).

And Anil’s article is one of the worst security related articles I’ve ever read. No security expert, nor scientific minded person would sign their name on it with it’s broad, sloppy brush strokes.

There is shame. Security was part of Matt’s State the Word. I don’t know anyone in the WordPress community that is happy with our security history, but it’s getting better and so are our developers.

There is appropriate optimism. With each release I see more potential security issues being reviewed and, when genuine, fixed earlier in the release process. The foundation of WordPress is also being improved to make security mistakes more difficult.

No one justifies the security issues because of popularity, but the IBM’s paper does reflect with popularity comes scrutiny. The loudest message from the paper might be that the bad guys have moved their focus from Windows to open source and to the web.

It seems only in the last couple of years has web security come to the forefront of the industries collective mind, and we’re all learning a lot. All three “top ten”, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla are benefiting from each others improvements, and the larger PHP community is helping a lot.

If Movable Type was as popular, and under the same amount of scrutiny, I can’t imagine they would still be storing passwords as plain text.

I’m confident that WordPress’s security record will get better and better!

The great technology rests on top of world-class support, an incredibly talented professional services group, and a media services team that will help your site and your community succeed.

That last link there is a 404, and maybe that is meta irony there. All those links go to Six Apart services, as does one from earlier in Anil’s article “(We’ll even help you design it.)”.

This is probably the largest difference between Movable Type and WordPress. WordPress is community developed and support — world class.

I remember reading Anil’s comment on Josh Catone‘s Read Write Web article “Six Apart Gets Into Microblogging with Activity Streams“. Here Anil didn’t like that WordPress Prologue — actually that’s a great example of someone not getting the idea, the story — but what bothered me was his attitude towards WordPress plugin developers:

There’s also an important distinction that this is a key part of our platform, developed by the core MT team itself. That means that it’s not a PHP script somebody cobbled together on their own to try to make a lifestream, it’s a framework to actually help open up *all* of these services

I read that as disrespectful to independent developers, WordPress or otherwise.

I see the Automattic team as the WordPress guide. WordPress is completely community created and supported. Automattic takes on the big (scalability) problems that the community doesn’t have the resources for like: providing the free WordPress.com service and fuding usability testing of a new WordPress dashboard experience.

We work with our community, not compete with our community. The work Automattic does is open source, released under the GPL.

Though the WordPress Consultants list, wp-pro and WP jobs are pretty good tools, currently, I expect much of the WordPress professionals’ work through personal relationships in the community. I think this is one of our greatest opportunities as a community. If you agree (blog about it) get in touch with Toni.

I mentioned that the work Automattic does is open source, whenever possible (Akismet is an exception). This isn’t the case with Six Apart’s Movable Type. I’ve written at length, “Movable Type 200% Open Source!“, about the missed opportunity.

With the release of Movable Type Pro, I think Six Apart’s current approach is bad for open source and actually dilutes open source. It seems others share my opinion, as on every thread there seems to be an open source advocate upset about MT Pro not being open source.

At first I was excited to see that the open source information was now on MovableType.com’s download page:

But then I realized the game this table plays is that the open source version isn’t good enough for “Bloggers”, only freetards like myself. I’m pretty sure, I’ve also read Six Apart telling people that the open source version isn’t tested or supported (but it’s the same software without some plugins, promise).

First, we set publishing free. Next up, social networks.

Actually, the WordPress community can take that first credit (not that I’m obsessed with 1sts) by creating the most popular installed blogging software, and it being open source. I don’t know about the next up, but there are many contenders, and WordPress and BuddyPress communities would be honored to be among them.

If I wanted to use Movable Type Pro for a social network with that Six Apart’s pricing it would probably be a social network of one. Anyway, without it being open source, it won’t be setting any one free, just making it a little easier to disobey the boss.

And that is why I think, Anil, people are so excited about BuddyPress, because it is among the real possibilities of setting social networking free.

our lead by planning to provide some of these abilities for WordPress in a collection of plugins that you should be able to assemble around Christmastime or so

There are so many reasons why I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Anil Dash has been pissing all over the web calling BuddyPress vaporware. See his comments at:

• CNET Webware “Movable Type, WordPress becoming social platforms“
• Mashable, “Six Apart Provides Social Networking Capabilities with Movable Type Pro“

Where I come from, vaporware is a derogatory term. It’s clear that he doesn’t like WordPress BuddyPress being part of the conversation.

BuddyPress isn’t vaporware, a community is developing it today. You can download the code today. It is open source today!

I get emails and IMs from friends that have checked it out and are already grooving on where it is going.

Collection of plugins

That is just a packaging issue, and packaging issues are easy.

Christmastime or so

This coming from a key member of the team that made a press release seven months before the open source flavor of Movable Type — well over a year, if a public bug tracker is an important detail to you. The community will decide when the code is ready to be called a product.

Wow, this is way long. I’ll wrap it up here.

I didn’t find the Movable Type Pro introductory video well done or sincere, hence the parody. Am I really so bad for poking fun at the competition? Does the tension date back to Six Apart not being invited to the Blogger and WordPress dance off?

I’ve tried it on my iPod Touch. They’ve done a great job! And are urgently working on fixing the worse bugs.

It’s already in the top 50 free apps.

Development has been managed by Raanan Bar-Cohen and the app is designed by Matt Thomas.

WordPress for iPhone has the clean Matt aesthetic, though I expect the iPhone SDK probably doesn’t allow much deviation from clean simplicity.

There is quite some stink up about whether or not we are breaking Apple’s iPhone development NDA by our application being open source, and speculation that Apple will sue us.

John Brownlee of BoingBoing Gadgets writes:

I was curious about the “Open Source” proclamation at the top of its non-App-Store webpage.

WordPress for iPhone is in the App Store. WordPress for iPhone’s Application Description has always stated it’s open source. Someone at Apple approved “WordPress for iPhone Open Source”.

Although it makes for a great story and gives us freetards reason to bang our chests, my thought is Apple has it’s anti-open source clause in the agreement to cover their butts from their code being “poisoned” by a viral license. Butt covered, let the open source applications flow, but no squirting.