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.”

Consider this simple example:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://example.com/wp-content/themes/default/style-ie.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />

If as part of a migration or server change, WordPress ends up in a sub-directory this will break.

For file system based access, if I see ABSPATH . '/wp-content/ … things are likely OK, though if WP_CONTENT_DIR or similar are changed, this will also break.

I’m tempted to use the constant STYLESHEETPATH or is it TEMPLATEPATH? But, those are static variables initialized early in the WordPress run.

I’ve been meaning to write this article for a while. Serendipitously, when I went to write a first draft of it, Mark Jaquith‘s had just published “Force CSS changes to “go live” immediately“.

In the comments, demetris suggests using STYLESHEETPATH, but Will Norris quickly points out “sure, but you still have the same problem of bypassing any plugins that may be using the ’stylesheet_directory’ hook to pull the stylesheet from some place else entirely.”

Mark’s solution beautiful illustrates how to get the the URL location of the theme’s files and also directly the URL for the main stylesheet style.css:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); echo '?' . filemtime( get_stylesheet_directory() . '/style.css'); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" />

What Will describes is exactly what WordPress.com depends on. We have a similar, but much more complex solution to deal with the CSS in the content delivery network (CDN) going stale on updates, and also some web browser’s with their funky caches not keeping up. Our solution is both for WordPress’s front end and dashboard (also dealing with the various ways CSS can be called or @imported).

I do have one niggle about Mark’s solution, and it’s the same with most WordPress code out there, the use of bloginfo(). Strings within strings within strings within strings give me headache, so to ease readability and make it more verbose replace:

bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); with
echo get_stylesheet_uri();

bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); with
echo get_stylesheet_directory_uri();

If you look up in the codex get_stylesheet_directory() you’ll see that would be the file system path, which is confusing given the behavior of bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); returning the URL. This presents another reason why I favor the consistency of always using the specific getter function calls. Also, when I’m using bloginfo() calls, I have a tendency to get in a mind set where I think I’m directly retrieving the option in the database (accessing directly the info shown in wp-admin/options.php). By using the specific getter function, I remember that there are hooks (actions, filters) that might be triggered.

Some of the other areas, I see wp-content is in CSS style sheets themselves. Relative paths are almost always the correct solution.

Far more painful for me are the plugins that assume where plugins are, because this can take quite a bit of debugging to unwind the assumptions.

That is a topic for me to postulate on another day. Will has written the very relevant “WordPress Plugin Pet Peeve #2: Direct Calls to Plugin Files“. Duane Storey has taken a crack at a “WordPress Plugin Checker“  for these and other common problems (which I’m certain he would enjoy feedback on).

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 product , 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.