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

I just updated to version 0.9 of Twhirl, my Twitter client of choice. The new version has some great new features including saved searches. Unfortunately there’s a small button change with annoying implications.

In previous versions, the “trash” button was on the far right (green circle). My normal method was to clear the tweets using this icon as I read, so that if I wanted to catch up on what I missed I’d know how far back to go. With the new version, the trash icon was moved to the left (red circle). On the right? The refresh button. Now, instead of trashing, my habitual mouse move to that location does a refresh which a) doesn’t clear the window and b) makes another hit to Twitter’s limited API.

I’m cranky. I’m using up API calls and momentarily wondering why hitting the button (which has always been in the same place) isn’t clearing the window. How is this an upgrade?

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]

Today was the Preconference day for PDC. I have a bunch of notes surrounding the Team System session I attended, and I’ll get those organized and posted. In the meantime, here’s the Flickr set of photos.

[tags]pdc, pdc2008, microsoftpdc[/tags]

I’ve been listening to the Stack Overflow podcasts lately. Stack Overflow is a community-driven site for developers being built by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. The issues they’re facing are common to any site or system which features users and community as a component. Here’s the message I would send to anyone in such a position: don’t reinvent the wheel – use existing (hopefully open) standards to implement your community and user management.

Building your own user and password management authentication system is wasted effort. The Stack Overflow guys are using OpenID, and you should too. Planning to have user icons or avatars? Why wouldn’t you want to use Gravatar and offload the icon management and bandwidth to their servers?

There is a lot of good progress being made on the Open Web; David Recordon and Marc Canter note that it’s time to start using what we have and building toward greater open interoperability. Avoid Not-Invented-Here syndrome; there’s no excuse to be building these components from scratch instead of supporting evolving standards. Leverage and be a part of the Open Web.

[tags]community, openid, gravatars, stackoverflow[/tags]

Help me understand.

I know a bunch of open source fans. From what I can tell, they have bad feelings about Microsoft, often citing the lack of standards compliance, closed systems, and hidden source code as reasons why they feel Microsoft is bad.

And they’re all happy users of the iPhone. Today was the big SDK announcement. If I understand the facts correctly, the only way for an app to get onto the iPhone is via Apple’s store, where they’ll take 30% of your software price. Apple gets to choose which apps it accepts or rejects. The developer program, just to be able to use the SDK and submit apps to apple, costs a minimum of $99 per year.

You can’t get much more closed than that.

How can one reconcile the “open source rules” and “down with big megacorps and their control” mantras and still happily go out, buy an iPhone, and then throw more money and control to Apple as a developer?

Does the fact that the iPhone is so damn sexy overcome the fact that it’s so damn closed?

Help me understand. Because you’d be hard pressed to find any sort of mobile device that’s a better symbol of closed-ness and corporate control than an iPhone.

[tags]iphone, apple, sdk, software, microsoft, opensource[/tags]

Tonight at the Portland Web Innovators group Jason Grigsby gave a presentation and led a discussion about the mobile web. He’s very passionate about mobile and presented some interesting statistics about mobile device usage and adoption rates (the U.S. lags far behind the rest of the industrialized world).

One of his major points was that the mobile web space is currently in a situation similar to that of the general web in the mid 90′s. Standards are absent. Most people aren’t yet on the platform, but it’s quickly growing. There are many browsers. Each browser renders content differently. Nobody is sure who will “win” the browser wars. Nobody knows the direction the mobile web will take.

It’s an exciting time for those who want to jump into mobile. Porting existing web applications to the mobile space is one aspect to the situation, but the real innovation in the mobile web will be with applications that haven’t yet been invented. Who would have thought a few years ago that one of the biggest mobile apps would be a hybrid web/SMS system where folks can send 140-character responses to the question “What are you doing right now?”. As mobile device adoption rates grow, new b2b and consumer applications will rise.

There was a brief discussion about tools; right now all of the major phone manufacturers (except for Apple) offer developer tools such as emulators to help with development efforts. Jason mentioned at least one vendor that is offering commercial tools that help translate code between devices. The commercial tool wasn’t cheap, which brought up another key point: at this point in the mobile web game, tools can be expensive because they’re rare. That stinks as a consumer, but is a great opportunity for someone who wants to work in the dev space.

As someone who started working in the web space in 1995, the next few years could be very interesting if things parallel the development of the web.

Keep an eye on the CloudFour blog, where I’m expecting Jason will post some followup information/links from his presentation.

[tags]mobile, mobileweb, pdxwi, jasongrigsby, grigs, cloudfour[/tags]

For Christmas I received the book Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg. I’m about halfway through, and Rosenberg interesting point about specifications. They are, by definition, specific (or at least they should be). Developers will write to the spec. Whether the spec solves the business need is a separate issue, but when it comes to software construction (like any type of construction), given a well-written specification the developers should be following the specification to the letter.

However, developers also need to get creative when participating earlier in the process, during design. At many shops (every shop I’ve ever worked at), developers will play both roles, participating in design and then later in construction. This dual role of creative thinker and rigid document-follower is an interesting paradox, a situation where in performing the duties of ones job, the mind needs to be creative and come up with new ideas, then reach a stage where new ideas are inherently bad and potentially project-damaging.

Perhaps the ideal programmer would have some sort of controllable multiple personality situation…

[tags]softwaredevelopment, software, developers, dreamingincode, scottrosenberg[/tags]

I read blogs by a number of software developers, and two of the ones I respect most are Scott Hanselman and Nick Bradbury.  As I was catching up on some reading I noticed that in the last week, both of them addressed the topic of work vs. non-work balance, including the issue of leaving tech life “on the job” or whether ones technical mind should continue to work after hours.

Scott’s post talked about how he dislikes working with “5:01 Developers” — those who mentally check out at 5:01 and drop their working/technology thoughts as they transition to home life.

Nick advised folks not to trade their lives for tech, getting out and enjoying a social life and afterhours culture that doesn’t revolve around coding, development, or technology at all.

Two bright guys making two statements that seem to contradict each other a bit.  Who is right?  Which is a better developer?  Someone who lives, breathes, thinks, and writes technical code 24×7, or someone who clocks in, does a good job working for a “normal” workday, then leaves his technical job behind as he moves on to have a non-technical social life in the evenings?

Honestly, I think there can be advantages to either lifestyle.  Someone who works on technical activities all the time might have a technical advantage, but that advantage might come at the expense of social activities.

Where do I fall?  I’d like to think I’m somewhere between the extremes.  As a software developer, I spend 8 hours a day writing code or participating in other development activities.  After hours, I blog, read technical articles, and have been known to be seen at a user group or forum.  On the other hand, I write very little code after work.  I enjoy time with my family (which grew by one member last week) and enjoying photography and other hobbies.

[tags]scotthanselman, nickbradbury, developers, softwareengineering, technology, work, family[/tags]