After the Deadline, the intelligent spell- and grammar-checking service Automattic acquired a few months ago, is releasing its core technology under the GPL. There’s also a new jQuery API that makes it easy to integrate with any textarea
. Ostatic writes about it here.
Monthly Archives: October 2009
Freedom in Action
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain this to you, a story about someone republishing Mark Pilgrim’s book and selling it on Amazon. Not directly about the GPL, but the principles are the same.
Keyboard Cover
Curious if you guys have any favorite keyboard covers, I vaguely recall reading about one on Alex King’s site but can’t find it now. I’m looking for one to put over my laptop keys when I close the cover to avoid damaging the screen.
Plugin Mistakes
Automattic in Quebec
Some of the Automattic team gets a tour of a rainy Quebec.
Elissa’s Wedding
In Austin for Elissa’s wedding with Walt. Elissa is also a wedding photographer in Austin.
Kids are All Right
My friend Liz Welch recently finished up her new book with her siblings, The Kids are All Right. “Well, 1983 certainly wasn’t boring for the Welch family. Somehow, between their handsome father’s mysterious death, their glamorous soap opera star mother’s cancer diagnosis, and a phalanx of lawyers intent on bankruptcy proceedings, the four Welch siblings managed to handle each new heartbreaking misfortune together. But all that changed with the death of their mother. While nineteen year-old Amanda was legally on her own, the three younger siblings—Liz, 16; Dan, 14 and Diana, 8—were each dispersed to a different set of family friends.” I just ordered it on my Kindle.
Q&A: WordPress & GPL
In this one we cover the GPL and how it benefits WordPress, why WP is under the GPL, commercial themes, how the GPL fosters innovation, creates value, and affects themes and plugins.
Q&A: WordPress & Open Source
This one covers how open source creates ownership, the importance of community to WordPress, the role of BuddyPress in social media, open source and government, and the infectious nature of the open source mindset. Hope you guys enjoy!
Irrational Finance
Two excerpts from Rational Irrationality: The real reason that capitalism is so crash-prone.
What boosts a firm’s stock price, and the boss’s standing, is a rapid expansion in revenues and market share. Privately, he may harbor reservations about a particular business line, such as subprime securitization. But, once his peers have entered the field, and are making money, his firm has little choice except to join them. C.E.O.s certainly don’t have much personal incentive to exercise caution. Most of them receive compensation packages loaded with stock options, which reward them for delivering extraordinary growth rather than maintaining product quality and protecting their firm’s reputation.
Here is another on financial innovation, which made me think of my bank post:
Limiting the development of those securities would stifle innovation, the financial industry contends. But that’s precisely the point. “The goal is not to have the most advanced financial system, but a financial system that is reasonably advanced but robust,” Viral V. Acharya and Matthew Richardson, two economists at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, wrote in a recent paper. “That’s no different from what we seek in other areas of human activity. We don’t use the most advanced aircraft to move millions of people around the world. We use reasonably advanced aircrafts whose designs have proved to be reliable.”
Q&A: WordPress Now
A Q&A about the future of WordPress. Filmed by Michael Pick, video by VideoPress.