Monthly Archives: April 2009

BuddyPress for the World

Asides, ,

Happy to announce that BuddyPress is now available to the world. BuddyPress is a package built on top of WordPress which transforms WP into a social network complete with profiles, friends, messaging, groups, and even activity streams. Of course it’s 100% GPL and Open Source. It’s built on top of MU (which can be tricky to install) so still not for everybody yet, but this is a major milestone in the WordPress world. Check it out. Congrats to Andy and the whole BuddyPress team. 🙂 Here’s Andy’s official  announcement post and WordPress.org.

Wired Joins the Family

Asides, ,

I wanted to take a moment to welcome Wired.com’s 12 blogs to the WordPress family! (They just completed their switch from Typepad.) I thought this completes my prediction from January that WP would reach over 40% of this list of top blogs, but when I went to the Technorati 100 today everything has changed! First, they only show ten blogs at a time now (lame!) and second there appears to have been huge churn on the list,so we’ll have to wait until next January to do an apples-to-apples comparison.

Blo.gs Lives On

Automattic, Essays, ,

Do you guys remember Blo.gs? In addition to being a cool domain, it’s a ping-update service like Ping-O-Matic that was started by Jim Winstead and acquired by Yahoo in June of 2005.

Some exciting news today: Yahoo! is transferring blo.gs to Automattic for safekeeping and further development. I’ve been a long-time fan of the service, and it even inspired the early WordPress feature which reordered your blogroll based on update times.

We’re looking forward to beefing up the service and giving it a refresh, while continuing its reputation for reliability. It makes me nostalgic to hear the name “blo.gs” again, I even still have the t-shirt they made for a Feedmesh meetup years ago. (For a big blast from the past, check out the discussion around feedmesh and real-time, distributed updates. Everything old is new again.) Major kudos to Yahoo! for giving us the chance to do so — I think most companies would have just shuttered it.

Toni has a few more thoughts.

Sun, Oracle, WordPress, and MySQL

Essays, WordPress

It’s magically beautiful outside in San Francisco today, but instead everyone is talking about the $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. (More on Techmeme.) A number of people have contacted me with questions to the effect of “Oracle is evil, they now own MySQL, WordPress runs on MySQL, OMG! What’s next?” In addition to the millions of WordPress blogs all using MySQL, all of the projects Automattic contributes to are MySQL-based and we run more than 250 servers dedicated to MySQL.

Last Thursday at The Next Web I talked about how we need an Internet Bill of Rights to protect our data and the countless hours we pour into complex online services, such as Facebook and Last.fm, and that the foundations for this were laid down 20 years ago by Richard Stallman and the GPL.

Today our servers are running various versions of MySQL, tomorrow they’ll be running the same thing, and if need be ten years from now they can run the exact some software. Because of the GPL every WordPress user in the world is protected — we’re not beholden to any one company, only to what works best for us. Today that’s MySQL, tomorrow that’s MySQL, a year from now we’ll see.

Most importantly whatever happens will happen on our timeline. That’s the definition of Freedom.

Here are few other reasons not to be worried, and a bonus at the end.

  1. Oracle bought Innobase, makers of the InnoDB engine that most large users deploy as their main storage engine, in October 2005. The sky has not yet fallen.
  2. As a company Automattic has never really needed the support services that MySQL provides and even if we did there are plenty of third parties also providing support.
  3. Most of the useful updates for MySQL have been coming from outside, to quote Jeremy Zawodny:

    The single most interesting and surprising thing to me is both the number and necessity of third-party patches for enhancing various aspects of MySQL and InnoDB. Companies like Percona, Google, Proven Scaling, Prime Base Technologies, and Open Query are all doing so in one way or another.

    On the one hand, it’s excellent validation of the Open Source model. Thanks to reasonable licensing, companies other than Sun/MySQL are able to enhance and fix the software and give their changes back to the world.

  4. In terms of innovation, the most interesting developments have been from outside as well, in projects like Drizzle. (I would not be surprised if this moment is for Drizzle what Movable Type changing their licensing was for WordPress, even though in this case they’re both Open Source.)
  5. I’ve met a number of people at Sun who are incredibly smart, and if they stick around I expect cool things to continue to come out.
  6. There are some new developments in the WordPress world, namely that I think it would be possible to add support for databases other than MySQL without changing every $wpdb call or breaking any plugins or themes. It won’t be easy, but the coolest stuff seldom is.

Anyway, I now really wish I had agreed to keynote at the MySQL User Conference starting today. 🙂