Spontaneous Monotony

It seems that, after their pricing change a couple of years back caused them to lose users (and the all-important third party developers), SixApart have finally seen the light and decided to release an open source version of Movable Type.

The MTOS press release doesn’t make it clear what form this will take: will it be a full version of MT, with the ‘commercial version’ having the same features but also a service contract for commercial ’service level guarantee’? Or will it be a cut-down rubbish version, with MTOS users basically acting as unpaid beta testers to increase SixApart’s commercial profits?

If the former, then this may very well resurrect MovableType. If the latter, it could be the final nail in a coffin which already closely resembles a porcupine.

Sorry folks, but with being busy I hadn’t noticed that I had totally arsed up the server configuration. Now sorted.

[EDIT] RSS feeds were still borked for some reason. Cheers to the person who let me know about these errors.

I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.2 - despite the ‘major’ version number change there aren’t actually any new features. The official ’sidebar widgets’ functionality, which was previously a plugin, is now integrated into Wordpress. That’s it. Usual request for help applies - if anything screwy happens, post a comment here.

EDIT: Because the ’single post’ template got overwritten during the upgrade, tags were missing for a couple of minutes - this is now fixed. Unfortunately I had to reset the cache so pages might load slightly slower for a short while.

As probably the most popular self-hosted blogging system ((I have a sneaking suspicion that, maybe, Typepad > Wordpress in terms of overall users - it seems helluva popular with corporate blogs)), Wordpress is now attracting the sorts of parasites that did more to kill P2P file sharing than the copyright cartels could ever have.

I’m talking, of course, about the adware peddlers. Such people create themes for Wordpress (of varying quality), and then use licensing restrictions to force the users of those themes to carry free adverts for sites of the theme author’s choice. Matt Mullenweg (in a post on the Weblog Tools Collection) suggests that this might actually be illegal:

Finally many of these themes try to legally disallow you from removing the advertising link by claiming it’s part of the Creative Commons attribution to leave it. This is almost funny, because these themes are on shaky legal ground themselves. WordPress is Free, meaning you’re free to do pretty much anything you like with it. It’s under a license that encourages user freedom called the GPL, which says if you distribute something that links internal functions and data structures of a GPL program (like themes do with WordPress) that also needs to be Free. At best, theme authors claiming you can’t remove the link are ignoring or ignorant of the license issues, at worst they’re actively exploiting (…) WordPress. ((Weblog Tools Collection - On Sponsored Themes))

I’m not convinced by that argument - proprietary Wordpress modules have been about for ages (most prominent among them Spam Karma 2, which is frequently promoted on the Wordpress Codex), and other GPL applications are distributed with proprietary modules without any legal issues at all ((Proprietary Linux graphics, wifi drivers ring a bell Matt?)).

Legal or not, adware themes are definitely not something that anyone associated with Wordpress - whether as a developer or a user - should want if they value the credibility of the project. I’m glad that Matt has come out heavily against these parasites ((They prey off the work of the Wordpress developers, and the PageRank of blog authors, so ‘parasites’ is a descriptive rather than a purely abusive term)) and that the Wordpress community more generally seems to be against adware themes.

Make no mistake, Textpattern is fantastic. But Wordpress just has some features that I can’t do without. Sure, those features are generally available in Textpattern, but they involve hacking of source code and such. I’m capable of such things (I had Textpattern up and running with my desired features after all) but if I wanted to play around with source code all the time then I would be doing this with Nvu instead of a blogging platform. Expect some silliness while I test out plugins and such, but (after hand-moderating the comments I imported from Textpattern - the Akismet ‘recheck moderation queue’ feature was predictably nonworking) I think everything is more or less up and running.