Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer. I don’t even play one on the internet. All of this post is speculation by a blogger.
WordPress, everyone’s favorite blogging platform, is released under the GNU GPL, an open source software license. The GPL is notable in that it not only requires that source code be made available, but that it stipulates that anyone may modify and redistribute that source code as long as the derivative works are also licensed under the GPL.
Is a theme integrated into WordPress closely enough that it’s required to be licensed under the GPL? This morning, Matt Mullenweg (creator of WordPress) posted a piece stating the “official” view that WordPress themes must be GPL.
How does this play with the premium (read: $$$) themes which are available for WordPress? I’m a big fan of Thesis (so much of a fan that I offer up that affiliate link), but a GPL-ed theme would wipe out the basic revenue model of “pay to use the theme.” There would still be opportunity for payment for services such as the excellent Thesis support forums, but the basic pay-to-use notion would be gone, since the code would be freely available from any number of sources.
I decided to pop the question of Thesis’ future to Chris Pearson (@pearsonified), the man behind DIYthemes which is the company that releases Thesis:
ahockley: Curious to see how this affects some premium themes, namely Thesis: http://bit.ly/txqE0 @pearsonified
pearsonified: @ahockley It won’t affect Thesis at all.
ahockley: @pearsonified Thanks for the reply… but… Thesis isn’t GPL, is it?
pearsonified: No
ahockley: @pearsonified So if Automattic says themes need to be GPL, and Thesis isn’t GPL, how does this not affect Thesis? Connect the dots for me
pearsonified: @ahockley Automattic says that, but they cannot and will not enforce it. Therefore, DIYthemes will continue to operate as normal.
Interesting way of handling the situation… sounds like Pearson isn’t planning to change his operation unless forced, and he’s confident that Automattic won’t press the issue.
Photo by stopnlook, used under Creative Commons licensing
At WordCamp: Las Vegas, Shayne Sanderson talked a bit about a new plugin coming from Instinct (the makers of wp e-commerce). The WordPress Wiki plugin adds basic wiki functionality to WordPress posts on pages, using WordPress user accounts and revisions to manage the edits.
It’s not going to replace MediaWiki, but it’s a nice way to add some lightweight edit and revision features to a WordPress blog. I’ve heard that the Beer and Blog folks are looking at it for documentation purposes, where it should provide an easy interface for managing documents and provide a nice front-end for some of WordPress’ back-end features.
If you’re looking for a lightweight way to wikify some of your website, check out the plugin.
At today’s PDC keynote, Ray Ozzie announced Windows Azure, a cloud-based platform for distributed .NET web offerings and SQL based data. It reaches into the same space as Amazon EC2 and the Google App Engine, but it provides these services to the masses which are using the Microsoft development platform.
As someone who develops for a public sector agency that deals with sensitive (legally protected PHI and other personal) information I see a couple different barriers that will probably mean I don’t write any sort of Azure software anytime in the near future. The first is a concern, almost a paranoia, about privacy. Government agencies that deal with individuals’ health records or protected criminal history information (think juveniles) are going to be justifiably concerned about transmitting and storing that information in a hosted environment. Yes, there are security protocols and encryption and a bunch of technological solutions which can help ensure data integrity and protection, but there is a significant pyschological barrier to overcome.
The second issue will be one of (lack of) necessity; many of the line-of-business applications simply don’t need the reliability or availability which are some of the most compelling reasons to move to a hosted datacenter/cloud model. A site such as SmugMug can effectively utilize hosted services to maintain a high level of reliability (at an affordable price) for thousands of customers, but large number of smaller intranet applications aren’t likely to be cloud candidates.
It’s an exciting platform. I’m sure I’ll play around a bit. I love the idea of being able to write .NET codes and deploy to Azure. I’m just not sure that it will play out as a business scenario for government.
[tags]azure, windowsazure, pdc, pdc2008, .net[/tags]
