The GPL and WordPress

A debate has been raging for the past several days over the legalities of WordPress.

Justin Rouch and I have been building Guild Press which is based on WordPress (open source software) and been preparing to launch a service based around the software.

When developing our service Guild Press we’ve been looking at the GPL very closely.

In this post I’ve gathered up some of the best points I’ve heard on the issue in to one spot.

The WordPress community is currently having a big debate over whether themes are considered derivative works of WordPress as per the GPL, the license used by WP.  The SFLChas previously declared that they consider the PHP code in WP themes a derivative work.  Other open source CMS software makers, such as Drupal, also consider themes derivative.

So, where do I stand as one of the primary copyright holders of WordPress?  I’d like to see the PHP parts of themes retain the GPL.  Aside from preserving the spirit of WordPress, respecting the open source ecosystem in which it thrives, and avoiding questionable legal ground, retaining the GPL is practical.

- Ryan Boren

Chris Pearson founded Thesis a few years ago and bucked the GPL license.  I listened to most of the interview and while Matt was defending the community and the platform Chris was constantly debating his revenue stream.  All I heard for most of the argument was what “I did”, who “I am”, etc.  And, in a bold statement, he claims to be one of the top three WordPress personalities.  I wholeheartedly disagree.  He has around 27k users – WordPress has 20m – that’s a stark minority.

- Mitch Canter

The long and short is that SFLC’s opinion could be applied to any software that runs on Linux.  Meaning you could never have a closed-source software product running on the linux kernel (“Oh, your code calls fork()? GPL!”).  It is commonly accepted that simply integrating with an existing product does not produce a derivative work.  If your code is totally your own, the GPL has no say over how you license it.

Per the GPL itself a derivative work is: “a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications” so you must copy actual lines of code from their source to be a derivative work. Simply calling WordPress functions doesn’t cut it.

My conclusion is that Thesis does contain GPL licensed code from WordPress.

So what does this mean?  I’d say it’s clear that Thesis uses GPL’ed code from WordPress and is therefore subject to the GPL as well. This makes the whole issue of whether “calling functions” or “running in memory with” requires the code to be subject to the GPL completely irrelevent.

As developers, it’s critical that you are very careful when using and re-selling code to follow the license agreements that we all adhere to.  Thesis clearly has a ways to go in this regard.

- Drew Blas

So now I want to know how you feel about the issue. Should themes that directly copy lines from WordPress be GPL.

My First WoW Addon

I’m pretty excited to say that my first addon is now live on Curse.com

Check out No Ports if you are mage on World of Warcraft.

I got sick of being asked to port people around to various cities. While I could just ignore the whisper I didn’t want WoW Instant Messenger even bringing up a whisper window. It annoys me.

So I created No Ports and now I’m releasing it to the world. All whispers asking for a port will simply never be delivered to you.

Want it? Head over here to get it: http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/no-ports.aspx

Keep The Landing Simple

We’ve decided to take a new approach to the Guild Press Facebook page. New users who haven’t become fans yet will now be presented with the following…

Click To Enlarge

We believe this new call to action with a simple explanation on what we do can really help increase our engagement.

Have any thoughts?

I Declared Facebook Bankruptcy

Facebook is by far the largest social site on the Internet. I’ve been on it since before it was opened to the general public and for the most part enjoyed my Facebook experience.

I’ve done a lot of things on Facebook. I’ve tested new features before they’ve come out, I’ve had great chats with the engineering team at Facebook, taken part in a Facebook Hackathon, watched many Developer Garages and even created a company that made social games and applications that was later flipped.

All of these things have been great. They created an interesting problem for me however.

I reached the friends limit last year. 5,000 friends.

My solution at the time was to create a fan page. It sucked though because I didn’t want to ask my friends to become my fans. I didn’t have much of a choice at the time though.

I wanted to communicate new stuff, build lasting relationships and talk with everyone that I had talked with in the past. I realized eventually that a fan page wouldn’t let me keep connecting with the smaller social circle and the larger social circle I had at the same time effectively.

I eventually deleted the fan page. Then I went through and deleted a lot of people from my Facebook account. I didn’t want to offend anyone and I hated to do it but things were out of control.

Flash forward a few months and the same thing began to happen all over again. Facebook started getting out of control. This time for different reasons though.

My news feed was filling up with applications that I didn’t care about (I was hiding everything as fast as  I could), the experience was going down hill for me and I felt my self spending less time on Facebook and in some cases starting to lose touch with some of my closer friends and business contacts.

My inbox was full with messages on Facebook, my wall full of comments, my news feed filled with spam. So I created a new account and deleted the old one.

A very drastic measure by any standard but one I felt necessary. This time I’m only adding the people who are close business contacts or close personal friends. If someone searches me down and re-adds me I will do so for a while but for the most part I am treating my Facebook experience more like I would treat my LinkedIn experience and keeping my social circle smaller.

It has drawbacks such as the social graph not being quite as powerful for me on other social sites but for the most part over the course of the last week I’ve kept my friend count below a hundred and overall been much happier with my Facebook experience.

I know I’ve missed some great people, I know I’ve missed some great business contacts this way and I know that is a problem but I’ve been trying to re-find them or re-add them as I can but overall again I’m very happy with what I’ve done.

I’ve declared email bankruptcy many times in the past but this has to be the first and only time I’ve ever declared Facebook bankruptcy.

A Close Look at Software Goals

Justin Rouch and I have been hard at work on a new platform called Guild Press.

Over the past few months we have been hard at work on establishing goals, creating the business, developing our plans, developing the software and figuring out our feature list. This isn’t an easy undertaking by any means. Especially as I’m looking over our original feature list.

When we first started brainstorming all of the features we wanted to see in Guild Press it became clear that the platform was going to be rather large. The worry wasn’t that we’d over complicate everything but rather that we couldn’t do it all or that we weren’t adding enough value to compete with some of the big players in guild site hosting.

My initial thoughts were that we needed to match feature-for-feature the competition and that we further needed to out-due them.

Here we are a few weeks later and I’m looking at the original feature list we compiled. We’ve added even more items to it and I’m starting to realize today that I am making a mistake that I think many other entrepreneurs are as well. Justin Rouch had some interesting thoughts when we spoke recently that we didn’t want to go all in right at the front of the product.

We are now able to focus on the biggest issue that our customers have told us they want us to tackle and later focus on the other features. This allows us to reduce our initial workload as well as build a new customer loyalty.

By not putting everything in the beginning of our product we are giving ourselves a chance to collect feedback, giving ourselves new features to develop in later revisions and keeping the novelty of what we’ve developed.

When Apple releases a new iPhone they release with a few new features that have been asked for in the past. I owned the iPhone, iPhone 3G and the 3GS. Each time a new iPhone is released a few incremental updates are made. These updates typically produce an applause from the crowd. The iPhone becomes novel again.

Apple likely can and does develop several new features for the iPhone each year but only rolls a few of them out at a time. This keeps the line fresh. This keeps it novel.

This creates loyalty and when you are buying an iPhone you are typically buying in to the promise that it will improve with each version and not just for the particular model you picked up.

This idea of creating the minimum feature set seems so simple yet can be so easily overlooked.

While we know that Guild Press in the early stages won’t meet the needs of every person who stumbles upon it we do know that we will be creating a group of very loyal first users. These are the people who are going to help lead the development cycle we decide to take.

This group of early users will help shape the product, will understand the development cycle and will also understand that many more great things are coming in the future of the product.

It seems risky. It is. We are essentially culling a group of users for the purpose of developing the product. We are allowing them to be in on the ground floor. They will be with us for the first minimum feature set but if we do things correctly and make them aware of what the Guild Press goals are early we understand they will be loyal and that they will help us develop the product.

What are your thoughts on this idea of developing for a small early group?

Thinking About Starting Up?

You don’t need me to tell you that the economy has been down for a while.

That is just obvious but what might not be obvious to a number of people is how great of a time we live in for starting up a new business.

I’ve been saying this for the past several months to just about everyone I’ve been talking with.

For some people the loss of a job might be a good reason, for others it could simply be a yearning for change.

If you’ve had the entrepreneurial itch then now is the time to scratch it.

You can get stuff for cheap right now. The things you will need for your startup. You can likely get them really cheap right now. With the down economy we find a lot of things that were once expensive can now be had for virtually a song.

Coworking is gaining momentum. Now you can find a place to work that isn’t your home on the cheap. It isn’t a new concept but it is starting to take off and if you’ve been looking to locate your business in a building then now is the time to investigate what options are in your area. Fort Wayne has two options with OurSpace and Destination Your Future.

If you are offering a service you have new found bartering power. On the local level you will now find that bartering is an even more powerful option. Don’t want to spend several hundred or thousand dollars for a service? You might be able to trade your services for another companies services.

You aren’t competing against as many people. Many people still haven’t lost their job. Many people aren’t willing to give up a good job to start something right now. See this as an opportunity to do something with fewer people trying to compete.

If you need talent you will find it. Good talent is laid off all of the time. Many times during a recession you will find the best talent is out of work. If you need that talent now is a good time to leverage the availability of it.

What are some of the reasons you think now is the right time to startup?