I’ve just become a paid New Media Manitoba Member, motivated by them hosting the great WordPress presentation Matt Wiebe did on Tuesday.
In other related news, I’m going to soon hold my first, and then hopefully weekly, WordPress Winnipeg workshop at Winnipeg’s hacker space, SkullSpace.
Look at me with my keyword-rich links!
And, above all, society needs to encourage the spirit of voluntary cooperation in its citizens. When software owners tell us that helping our neighbors in a natural way is “piracy”, they pollute our society’s civic spirit.
Richard Stallman – Why Software Should Not Have Owners
I find the WordPress “premium” plugin and theme business models odd, and the community attitude toward sharing the code for those is one that is beyond my understanding currently.
I was saddened today to again request a piece of GPL software from my fellow WordPress users on the WordPress channel on freenode and be met with a “This is not a warez channel” and “You will be banned if you ask this again”. After a little contemplation, and confirming that this is the official policy, I have come to accept that since they own the channel, they have the right to choose what conversations are taboo. I get it, though I still regret it.
It saddens me that my favorite website development platform promotes this opinion that a noble act of sharing software you possess is something to be frowned upon. As soon as I learned about the distinction between Free Software and the Open Source software asset management strategy, I have been a proponent of Free Software in addition to the Open Source software asset management strategy. Perhaps Free Software is a concept that is hard to grasp for people who have never had to go without something they needed, something I was lucky enough to experience during my modest childhood. I am more and more aware of the lack of this experience in my Daughter’s North American life so far, and a little worried about the consequences.
The position that “redistributing code [of GPL premium plugins equals to] … asking people to undercut wp-based businesses” is quite an interesting one to have, for a community that demands the derivative software such as themes and plugins release their software under the GPL. In fact, on my bike ride home, I realized that if the WordPress.org project was to adopt the corrected GPLv3, this would probably cause some trouble for the WordPress.com service. Interesting stuff, I’ve not thought about that before.
@Natchuk Thank you very much for the retweet. I’m trying out the cool “Social” plugin Matt suggested on this site, BTW. Check it out!