New developments
I've been working with my friend Jim Thompson: http://www.smallworks.com/, setting up a couple of new Wordpress: http://wordpress.org/ weblogs: one for my daughter Colette (an associate professor in the Theater department at UMBC), and one for myself. There's not much at either location yet, but if you want to check them out, you'll find them here:
I went with Wordpress for several reasons. First, it's open source, and promised to run nicely on Searls.com's Linux server at Rackspace. Second, I wanted a Web-based system that was technically open enough to tweak, yet easily usable by a non-technical newbie like Colette. I had tried Blosxom: http://www.blosxom.com/ earlier at the same location, and liked it; but decided it was too hacky for our paired Searls tastes. Third, I wanted to work with a system I could trouble-shoot for both of us. And fourth, I really liked what Mark Pilgrim wrote about Wordpress and the GPL last year on Mark's own (now dormant) blog, after expressing disappointment with Moveable Type -- which had been sort-of open-source, but changed over to a commercial license, annoying developers like Mark: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/14/freedom-0. Here it is:
Many people misunderstand Free Software and the GNU General Public License. Many people equate the GPL to the boogeyman, because it’s "viral", and that sounds like a bad thing. Here’s what viral licensing means: GPL software has the restrictions that it has, and that’s it. The GPL is quite restrictive on developers, not at all on end users. (More on that in a minute.) Regardless, GPL software has the restrictions that it has, but it can never become more restrictive. An upgrade can’t take away freedoms that I enjoyed with an older version.
A side effect of this is that, if I write a GPL program and then lose interest, and someone else picks it up and continues development, they are forced to release their version under the GPL. A new developer can’t take away freedoms that I enjoyed with the old version either.
I mention this because it’s exactly what happened with WordPress. It started life as b2: http://cafelog.com/, which was abandoned. But a year ago, a new community coalesced around a fork of the original b2, and it became WordPress. The new community included some of the original developers, and many new developers. Because the original software was GPL-licensed, WordPress was also GPL-licensed.
No one is allowed to fork Movable Type, because it’s not open source.
The Wordpress development team is now working on releasing version 1.2. Version 1.2 will be GPL-licensed. Version 1.3, if it exists, will be GPL-licensed. Version 2.0, if it exists, will be GPL-licensed. I will never be surprised by the licensing of new versions of WordPress.
Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program, for any purpose. WordPress gives me that freedom; Movable Type does not. It never really did, but it was “free enough” so we all looked the other way, myself included. But Movable Type 3.0 changes the rules, and prices me right out of the market. I do not have the freedom to run the program for any purpose; I only have the limited set of freedoms that Six Apart chooses to bestow upon me, and every new version seems to bestow fewer and fewer freedoms. With Movable Type 2.6, I was allowed to run 11 sites. In 3.0, that right will cost me $535.
WordPress is Free Software. Its rules will never change. In the event that the WordPress community disbands and development stops, a new community can form around the orphaned code. It’s happened once already. In the extremely unlikely event that every single contributor (including every contributor to the original b2) agrees to relicense the code under a more restrictive license, I can still fork the current GPL-licensed code and start a new community around it. There is always a path forward. There are no dead ends.
The live end that is Wordpress is a pretty active one. I run across people working on, and with, WordPress all the time. It's a happening environment, sustained by a happening community.
Not that setting it up and using it has been a bargain, so far. I've set up and used Moveable Type and TypePad blogs before, and they were much easier. (In this case, Jim, whose competence appears absolute, did the heavy lifting.) Writing for MT and TP seems easier, too; though maybe that perception will change in time. I still don't know any blogware that makes writing easy. (I have my preferences, however. More about those below.)
It also annoyed me that Wordpress came with a defaulted blogroll only an administrator could change. (Jim tells me that shouldn't have been the case, but that's how it worked for me.) Also, while the list of templates is huge and varied, none of them looked all that interesting to me. Although that hardly matters. Designing new templates doesn't appear to be all that hard; and I want both blogs to get a little mileage, and to develop they're own purposes and personalities before they become design projects.
The blog at doc.searls.com will probably be limited to show notes and subscription details around personal podcasts that I'll start putting up after I get going with podcasting at IT Garage: http://itgarage.com. The latter is a professional necessity that will help prime the editorial pump at Linux Journal, while lending some helpful energy to IT Garage as well. So it's downstream a bit -- I'm guessing several weeks. I'd like to get going with podcasts on IT Garage sooner than that. Stay tuned.
One thing I've wanted to do with podcasting is record on some kind of portable device, such as the Linux-based Archos PMA400: http://www.archos.com/products/overview/pma_400.html.
While the Archos will play DRM'd media files from Microsoft and others, it isn't a member of anybody's silo. Much as I enjoy and appreciate the iPod, it's one of the most silo's devices ever made: the hardware end of Apple's iTunes. The Archos is wide open, and useful in countless ways the iPod is not.
There is also this, from Dave Winer's May 19th Morning Coffee Notes podcast:
... we've still yet to have a real platform. I don't think the iPod is a platform. In past history, all of the really killer platforms have had one thing in common: that you could use the platform itself to create for the platform...
It creates an understanding of the limits of the platform...
We call it 'podcasting', but is the iPod the platform?... the way it's shipped today, you can't use it to record...
I'm recording this podcast on my Archos PDA.
This Archos seems like a good thing to be thinking about right now. Why? Because it's open. Because it runs Linux software. Where the iPod is a closed box. My bet is either the iPod opens up or it gets heavily competed with by something that's open... This feels like a platform.
Then, a little while later, this:
I plan to write software for this thing, for sure. Whjebn I figure out how I can get Frontier on this thing, because that's how I like to write software. (Frontier) is open source, so if you've got a couple of weekends and you'd like to port Frontier to Linux, go to http://kernel.scripting.com and download the source and get busy... That would make me so happy.
Frontier is GPL'd.
There has been additional news, around the iPod and RSS (which Dave pioneered, and continues to lead), and podcasting. Right now we only have a few reports -- about podcasting support inside iTunes and iPod, but those reports are not clear enough for me to feel comfortable commenting on them. So I'll hold off on that.
Meanwhile, I'll say this much. Future versions of both WordPress and iPodder (two critical open source projects) need to be much more capable and easy to use than whatever it is that Apple is cooking up for the vast iTunes/iPod silo. This is a marketplace where Apple is no less dominant than Microsoft was with Windows and desktops.
What we need from WordPress and iPodder is the same high levels for ease-of-use, openness and raw capability that are modeled today by FireFox and (I believe to a lesser extent) by Thunderbird.
The next few months are going to be really interesting.