Quick question; if global tags are such a great thing, why do Automattic use internal tagegories on their own wordpress.com blogs? I know internal tagegories make a lot more sense, but if you’re inflicting the Way Of Stupid SEO Gaming upon everyone else you really ought to eat your own dogfood.
Archive for July, 2009
the smiley liberation front
I am now so enraged by the mysterious disappearance of my beloved roll-eyes smiley, and the replacement without notice of ALL existing smilies with anaemic substitutes and the lack of any response to my bug report concerning same, that I need all you logged-in people to go along and rate this FAQ as Very Poor, at least until it stops telling lies. 
!= 
.
(Yes, I know, there he is. But I need him in comments! And for some bizarro reason even though I can post VIDEOS in OTHER PEOPLE’S comment threads I can’t post an ickle 16×16 gif in my OWN, even though there is a clearly visible BUTTON in the edit window inviting me to insert an image. In what universe does this make any form of sense? I told you I was enraged.)
Would you go into my blog and change the font or header image without my say-so? No, you would not, so quit messing with our content and give us the option to choose the old smilies. We know they are not things of great beauty and they do not match the floofy backend, but at least you can see what they’re supposed to be.
gifts
[long sigh]
OK people, censored comment on this post. (No, I don’t know why people blog if they don’t welcome comments either. You’d have to ask them. Just don’t go expecting an answer.)
Of course, if people have been ripping off CC-licenced images and CSS, this judgement clarifies that the original creators are well within their rights to pursue the offenders; and nine times out of ten those are the elements of the theme people are interested in stealing, not the fairly generic PHP files. I know Automattic doesn’t believe there’s any distinction between functional, not-visible-to-end-users PHP and creative artwork, but it’s sad that you’re still living in denial even when your internet lawyers have conceded the point.
One of my friends is a successful livejournal designer who has had some of her templates converted by a third party (without her permission, by the way) to wordpress themes. I’m not sure it’s actually legal to relicence someone else’s creative work as GPL, whether you’re lifting it wholesale from another platform or merely using CC-licenced images or resources, but if these people were to upload these templates to wordpress.org that’s what the situation would be. You’re obviously cool with that. I, equally obviously, am not.
WP is GPL because of a decision Michel Valdrighi made several years ago. It doesn’t make coders morally superior that they abide by the licencing terms they’re lumbered with, and it doesn’t make designers bad people to want to be credited and compensated for their creative work. Sure, you can force people to embrace GPL by blackmailing them or encouraging others to relicence their content on their behalf, but I still don’t believe that’s how open source should operate. A gift that isn’t given freely isn’t really a gift at all.
Mostly. I’m disappointed with the lack of any denial that stealing and relicensing other people’s stuff is OK with Automattic. We all knew that was the case anyway, but it’s depressing to have it confirmed again.
it is what it is
Wow. Disingenuous, much? Your internet lawyers just admitted that the only elements of a theme covered by GPL are the PHP files, but you’re going to go ahead and insist on everything else being GPL anyway.
(What happens, by the way, if I give all the WP functions their own files within the theme, separating them from the html and calling them with a common-or-garden php include? Would index.php catch GPL merely by virtue of calling files that calls WP functions? OK, so nobody in their right mind is going to attempt this, but still.)
Actually this is pretty reassuring for anyone still clinging on to CC — they can protect their CSS and images if they choose to do so, freeing them to use third-party CC content such as icons, photos, brushes or backgrounds. HTML generally isn’t special enough to be worth protecting anyway. They can’t submit the resulting themes to wordpress.org — Automattic don’t have the resources to moderate them — but nobody really suffers from that apart from users who are too lazy to look beyond its heavily limited selection; it’s not like there’s a shortage of alternative directories.
Meanwhile, I feel vaguely sorry for the saps who bought multi-use licences for hundreds of dollars from the various premium theme developers, only to discover within months (or weeks, or even days) that those who only bought a single-use package are now getting exactly the same deal, and that anyone who downloaded a pirate copy for nothing has officially done nothing wrong. But they don’t seem to be complaining too much (or maybe their comments are being censored, or maybe they’re too ashamed to admit to their stupidity in public, who knows?)
I can see that the developers were pushed into a corner here; you can’t risk being ostracised by the company who own your platform, because without official backing people won’t trust you enough to do business with you. It was OK while everyone was in the wilderness together, but as soon as one sucked it up and toed the GPL line they all had to, or he was going to get the monopoly. If you make iPhone apps you’re at the mercy of Apple, if you build a business around wordpress themes you’re at the mercy of Automattic. It’s just the price you have to pay. I still don’t believe that the GPL was conceived with the intention of being used to protect the interests of big corporations and manipulate the little guys, but it is what it is.
