A few pictures of day 2 of WordCamp; lots of Texas clouds, which are the prettiest in the world.
WordCamp Dallas and WordPress 2.5
The talk this morning at WordCamp Dallas was quite enjoyable. The audience here is very sharp and on-point, there was a ton of participation and great questions. They also had delicious Rudy’s BBQ for lunch, which I nibbled at as much as I could. Also (roughly) concurrent with the talk we released WordPress 2.5. Funnily because I kept the edit screen for the announcement open from stage the concurrent editing protection prevented anyone else fom publishing the post! Andy told me after I was done and I pushed the button, but it’s good to know the feature works. 🙂
First Day of WordCamp
First day of WordCamp in Frisco, TX.
Audacity of Code
Ray Ozzie Interview
MyBabyOurBaby.com on MU
MyBabyOurBaby.com is a baby scrapbooking site built on WordPress MU. They were written up in Mashable a few weeks ago, surprised it hasn’t gotten more coverage. It’s a good example of what MU is capable of, joining Edublogs, AllthingsD, and Chickspeak. Any other awesome MU-powered sites you’ve seen recently?
Easter with Family
Easter meal with family, hanging out in backyard, and playing pool.
Easter
Easter at home with family in Houston.
Dallas WordCamp
I’m looking forward to WordCamp Dallas next week. I’m in Houston getting my wisdom teeth out on Monday, but I’m hoping to be back at full-speed for the conference.
Gallery
Black and white photos from dinner with my family and a pet store.
Share Icon
The open source Share Icon is back, after its trace disappearing from the internet for a time. Good on Share This for promoting this project to the community. The spread of this icon, which already is incredibly ubiquitous, will continue.
Final day in New York
Breakfast at Le Pain Quotidien with Jane; a rainy day in New York City.
NYC Day 2
New York Times; True party at Hearst building
St. Patrick’s day in NYC
Travel to NYC, dinner and drinks for St. Patrick’s day.
Around the Garden
Around the garden at my parents’ house.
Christian Lander on SWPL
Stuff White People Like’s Christian Lander: The Heeb Interview, a short interview with the fellow behind the now-famous SWPL (hosted on WordPress.com, naturally), which has already spawned copycats.
Drinks and Pie Fight at Rice
Met Richard Yoo, had mexican food and drinks with friends, and wandered around Rice into a pie fight.
New Gravatar
The rewrite of Gravatar from Ruby to PHP is done. The backend should be identical, the serving of Gravatars should be even faster, and as a bonus we now support SSL Gravatars.
Family at Brookwood
Lunch at Brookwood Community, exploring the grounds and flowers, Mom’s birthday dinner.
WordPress is Open Source
Six Apart has recently decided that the best way to win back customers fleeing their platforms is to target WordPress, which is a new strategy they call competing. (What have they been doing the past 7 years?) A good example is this exchange between a commenter on Valleywag and Byrne Reese, the lead developer of Movable Type:
Sundown: “@anildash: what part of WordPress is not open source?”
byrnereese: “@Sunnduwn – I think that is a question better asked of Automattic. Anil, and certainly not Six Apart, has never been briefed, nor has anyone for that matter been presented with an accounting of what is open and closed source at Automattic.”
Okay, here’s some accounting:
WordPress is 100% open source, GPL.
All plugins in the official directory are GPL or compatible, 100% open source.
bbPress is 100% GPL.
WordPress MU is 100% open source, GPL, and if you wanted you could take it and build your own hosted platform like WordPress.com, like edublogs.org has with over 100,000 blogs.
There is more GPL stuff on the way, as well. 🙂
Could you build Typepad or Vox with Movable Type? Probably not, especially since people with more than a few blogs or posts say it grinds to a halt, as Metblogs found before they switched to WordPress.
Automattic (and other people) can provide full support for GPL software, which is the single license everything we support is under. Movable Type has 8 different licenses and the “open source” one doesn’t allow any support. The community around WordPress is amazing and most people find it more than adequate for their support needs.
Movable Type, which is Six Apart’s only Open Source product line now that they’ve dumped Livejournal, doesn’t even have a public bug tracker, even though they announced it going OS over 9 months ago!
I had held off criticizing them after they went OS and before they decided to start an all-out confrontation because that’s not generally what OS projects do to each other.
For as long as I can remember the WordPress about page has linked and thanked Movable Type for ideas and inspiration.
Movable Type once led the market, it had over 90% marketshare in the self-hosted market. Now they call “pages” and “dynamic publishing”, features WordPress has had for 4+ years, innovation and you still can’t do basic things like click “next posts” at the bottom of home page.
For the record, I’m glad they’ve taken the license of MT in a positive direction that prevents them from betraying their customers like they did with MT3, but they have a long way to go before the project could be considered a community.
WordPress did 3 major releases last year, we’ll do 3 major releases this year. Along the way thousands of people will contribute, as well as every employee of Automattic. What we build will be greater than the sum of its parts because we’ve been a community and open source from the beginning, and always will be.