Yesterday I opened my dashboard and noticed syn-thesis-1 by Matt Mullenweg in a window – It’s a prerogative of some WordPress developers to have their posts in one of the WordPress dashboard windows.
Matt Mullenweg (@PhotoMatt) is the guy behind WordPress, the blogging platform software I use here.
Jane explained the issue to me in the comments to her post:
The uber-simple version: the WordPress license states that derivative code (based on WordPress, using WordPress core functions, etc) inherits the GPL license and must retain the user freedoms that the WordPress license guarantees. Chris uses WordPress code (in some cases directly copied and pasted from WordPress core), but is not following the rule of the WordPress license, and is instead releasing his Thesis theme under a restrictive license, which takes away the user freedoms that the WordPress license exists to guarantee. Basically, developing on WordPress has one rule by the license agreement: you can take our code for free and build on it, but any work that comes out of that and is publicly distributed must be made available for modification and redistribution just like WordPress itself. Chris doesn’t like that rule because the second part of it would allow other people to build on his work, and he doesn’t want them to be able to. So he takes advantage of the first part of the rule, and violates the second.
It is not about the money
Jane further explained:
As has been stated many times (and is in the license itself), the GPL issue comes into play with public distribution. If you create a theme for your own use and don’t distribute it at all, license isn’t an issue. If you create a work for hire for a client you should deliver the source code to them (which you do when you deliver the theme), but you do not need to append a license to it b/c you are simply delivering work for hire. Only when you engage in public distribution (make it available publicly via the web or other delivery mechanism, whether paid or free) do you need to think about the license. At that point, yes, your PHP theme code needs to be GPL, but you can license your images and CSS under whatever license you like in order to protect the intellectual property of your designs.
Why 0-1?
Listening through the audio interview with Matt I concluded Chris was angry. He wasn’t drunk as he stated somewhere on Twitter. He shouldn’t have been angry. By loosing his temper he lost it. He clearly didn’t make a cohesive case. The end of the story is that he dared Matt to sue him. I’m not sure a judge from behind his desk would be able to solve the matter in a way the community could live with.
Matt kept his calm and announced another weapon: He offers Thesis users to buy them a GPL compliant premium theme.
I might consider to take Matt up on that offer.
On another note: Is it mere coincidence that Matt chimes in after WordPress 3.0 was released that has many features and functionalities Thesis offered long before 3.0 was launched?
Update
The issue intrigues me from various points of view. Especially the fact that both characters are behaving more like trolls than sensible people.
I’m collecting some links here for further reading:
In themes are GPL too Matt posted a (part of?) a Software Freedom Law Center opinion on the matter already back in July 2009. Here he goes over the boundary in my view:
Even though graphics and CSS aren’t required to be GPL legally, the lack thereof is pretty limiting. Can you imagine WordPress without any CSS or javascript? So as before, we will only promote and host things on WordPress.org that are 100% GPL or compatible. To celebrate a few folks creating 100% GPL themes and providing support and other services around them, we have a new page listing GPL commercially supported themes.
I believe you can, and actually I believe this is the only way a small hotel or Bed and Breakfast should do it!
I’ve seen it being done and I’m in the process of doing it myself, albeit in a more or less triple jumpy way.
I’ve announced this as My Main Project for 2010 already in January. Therefor this is number 2 in what will become a mini series.
However I had started a lot earlier with a post Haagsche Suites – At your service. That post didn’t come into existence than after various trial and errors with installing the WordPress Software, various updates and an unfortunate migration of the site to another server. If you like, you can read What is slowing down the Site Transition?.
The major jump forward (or should I say giant or quantum leap forward?) dates from last week and past weekend and is fourfold now:
I use the booking engine of Hoteliers.com for guests to book my suites. Last week with their help I finally managed to take the main hurdle. I wanted availability viewable from every page on the hotel site. Now the widget opens in the main body of the site and is easy readable. However, the downside is that I cannot use any other widget than that, at least no other widget that uses an IFrame, because both wouldn’t work anymore.
Nevertheless: I believe every hotel should consider using Hoteliers.com They provide very good value for money and are a good counter balance to the other parties on the web who (re)sell your hotel rooms on the commission model. They are awfully costly for the hoteliers. In addition I believe those commission based room (re) sellers are among the largest advertisers on Google who make the fat company fatter and fatter. But I will go deeper into this issue in a separate post
With the release and installation of Thesis Theme version 1.7 of DIY Themes it is much easier to create drop down menus to make navigation of your site simpler for your site visitors. However, I do hope with version 2 they will come up with alternative navigation possibilities, as it is my experience that users do not always understand drop down menues.
In addition Thesis version 1.7 is written for optimal speeding up the load time of your site or blog and there is no other theme alike for fine tuning your site for SEO.
Darren Cronian of Travelrants pointed me again to the Nexgen Gallery plugin for WordPress by Alex Rabe. I had kicked it out earlier, because it didn’t go well with the PHP – MySQL version of my service provider. Now it works fine. I have played around with the size of the thumbnails extensively: As long as it took to get a balance between loading time and visibility of the thumbs, because I believe a homepage should not be packed with images and other stuff. It should be the easily navigable point of entry to my little empire.
Speed Matters
I’m proud the landing page Haagsche Suites takes only 1.43 seconds to load.
I measure the speed with a FireFox addon, Firebug 1.5.3, a nifty little tool every Blogger should have. Not only does it show speed, but it also gives errors. Firebug also tells me I should do away with all those widgets that load faces, little avatars of those who visit my sites. I love to put faces to the visitors of my sites, but “No” Firebus says “You should kick them out”.
Therefore I have taken away already several of such time consuming widgets from here like MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog and some more I already forgot. Recently I found a nifty new widget on the BlogCatalog Site.
I have also taken away the Google Friends widget, in one way or another Google doesn’t succeed in being socially acceptable. Buzz Failed in my opinion and Google friends doesn’t do a lot either and takes tremendous amounts of time to load. Face Book on the contrary made a quantum leap forward wit it’s I’Like program, but the widgets I use here are also much to time consuming.
Final observation:
During the last couple of weeks I’ve been experimenting with another nice WordPress Plugin, Link Within which gives your readers suggestions for similar posts combined with little thumbs of those posts. My conclusion is that I will get rid of it again, as it costs too much time to load and isn’t as to the point as the similar posts plugin.
Update:
I thought to provide some good examples of blog based hotel sites for your consideration:
Chanters Lodge by @Richard Chanters does a good job with a self hosted blogspot based hotel site. He’s a frontrunner as he started out very early at the now closed Yahoo “platform”.
I mentioned the Witt Istanbul earlier here.Now they seem to have moved their blog part somewhere else. Curious to know why, but what a stylish site!
I’ve only one New Year’s resolution: to bring my main project for 2010, the redesigning of the Haagsche Suites website, to a level where it can work stand alone, as soon as possible.
After last year’s unfortunate computer crashes, server migrations and now the unfortunate hacking of two of my sites - all costing me too much of my precious time I’m underway again. I’m using the Thesis theme for WordPress which has a couple of wonderful features to change the lay out in a simply way.
Could some in the know please help me with comments either here,
or there: about the general idea of turning the whole upside down: changing from a dedicated static site maybe with a separate blog into a dynamic site with an integrated blog. Am I stupid?
or there: do you know of better alternatives for automatic machine generated translation?
or there: the pros and cons of having dedicated “language” urls, or should I install WordPress MU?
I’ve Transferred the links I missed from the old server for the second time to here. After my ISP crashed two or three times I’m glad today there were no crashes.
I’ve deleted most content from the old server now. Finally I can concentrate on other things than going backward and forward. Especially on the enormous backlog of posts I want to publish here.
Nobody tells you that when you export and import a WP site the photos you’ve uploaded get resized. In itself that is not so much of a problem, but but but, all of a sudden I find photos in duplicate triplicate or quadruplicate, depending on when uploaded and at what size put here in the blog…when I moved to Thesis I was glad to be able to post photos of 600 pix width rather than the old 460 pix width that I used….and now all of a sudden I am using far more space on the servers than I used to do on the old server….darn another cleaning job to do.
I’ve been under the hood of the design and have removed the background photo of the garden, because I found looking at the blog as a whole it distracted too much from the photos and the content. In addition it seemed to load from the server as one of the last items which made loading annoyingly slow.
I’ve changed the logo to one that is simpler and where the name of the blog is a bit better visible and without the tag line
With the 1.6 Thesis theme it is very easy to change fonts, sizes and colors of characters and colors of backgrounds. All in all the design is a bit cleaner now.
The next step is to bring the links and archives to a separate page and bring back the number of posts to 5 rather than 10 on the landing page and remove some widgets as they slow up the site. But then I would like my pagination back.
Picture by Daniel Larusso
