Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Tag: essay

  • Giving WordPress That New Car Smell (Part 1)

    Giving WordPress That New Car Smell (Part 1)

    It’s been a while since I redesigned my sites, and this isn’t something I do very often. I also have a tendency to stick to a ‘theme.’ For the longest time, I was really homogeneous with the sites on this server. All my Ipstenu sites ran Retro Fitted and then Twenty Eleven. As we got near 3.4 I was all set to shift to Twenty Twelve, but when that was kiboshed, I sat and thought “Well, what do I want?”

    Redesigning a site is not to be taken lightly. As I mentioned before, too many changes confuse your visitors. For the last few years, I’ve kept my sites pretty much the same, and this is normal for me. I mean, look at the designs for JFO! Clearly I find a style and stick by it. I don’t consider myself a ‘theme designer’ person, either. I can tweak the hell out of a theme, but inventing them? No way. I’ve never been very good at the part of art where I’m supposed to take an idea and make it visual. Oddly, I can do it with words and ‘people’ (think directing a play), but while I can see these things in my head, putting it down on paper fails me.

    So why the dramatic change from everything the same to everything different?

    Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. There’s a theme through these themes, actually. They’re all simplistic, focusing on the content in a way that I can, easily, shove the sidebars out of the way when needed, and showing you what’s important. I didn’t want to get distracted by bells and whistles, but I also wanted a theme that was easy to tweak. Ipstenu.org I wanted to look a little more grown up, Half-Elf needed to be more professional (but still as irreverent as I am (In talking to Dana Severance, she asked what my ‘voice’ was for my ebooks. I said ‘Ms. Frizzle, after 10 years in corporate America.’ And it’s true.)), and my photos needed to be about photos and nothing more. I also didn’t want to fuss with colors too much, they can be a big distraction, and just putting up a black/white with accents felt ‘right.’

    Once I committed to simplification, I cut down my menus while keeping them similar to what they were, and I kept my favicons as they were (though Half Elf has been sporting a Spock eye for a week now). Menus are tricky. You want people to find what they want, quickly, but you also want to guide them to where you want them to be. By cutting down the clutter, and having a little down-arrow on menus with drop-downs, I can gently nudge people around.

    Buzz-words annoy me, and I try to avoid terms like ‘call to action’ whenever possible. Instead I thought of as the purpose. I like using ‘static’ content on front pages for that, as they can explain why you’re here, show you what’s new, and grabs you. The new Half-Elf page really does that, with the big honking ‘ad’ for the book. The haiku keeps you thinking ‘This is Mika,’ and the rest confirms that. On Ipstenu.org, the sales pitch is smaller, but you still have a little ‘who am I?’ blurb to get you started. While I wanted it to look grown up, I really felt the ‘feel’ of me had to stay. That’s the only site where you’ll see my Twitter stream, for example. As for the photos, well, they were simple.

    I drew out what I saw in my head on paper a few times. A header, a menu, a ‘grab you’ blurb, and the content. It’s a good layout for me, I felt the eyes naturally flowed. Sorting out where on Half-Elf to put that ‘recent post’ inset was tricky, as I wanted it to be ‘above the fold,’ if you’ll pardon the archaic reference. Speaking of, all these themes are ‘responsive’ so if you shrink your browser, they adjust. Except for the leaderboard ad in the footer. I need to sort that out.(What I want is for if your screen is less than X wide, it vanishes. Maybe I’ll play with hiding the overflow.) This does not contradict my drawing deficiencies I mentioned before, by the way. When I ‘drew’ my layout, what I did was grid it out. That part wasn’t ‘art’ and I didn’t try to make anything pretty. I just made a list of what the themes needed in black, what I wanted in blue, and what I knew would be custom work in red.

    I ended up with three premium themes that I’ve added functions and style to, but that’s it. While I may have made child themes, there’s no duplication of code. That is, my child themes have two files (functions.php and style.css) and possibly some images. That’s. It. halfelforigin is the child for Half-Elf, ipstenubalance is for Ipstenu.org, and photodotos is for the Photo site. The first half of the name is the site, the second half is the theme. I’ve always done it this way, which is why I also have an ipstenu2011 folder in there.

    Oh, and why does the ipstenubalance not have a style.css? We’ll get to that.

    But that will have to wait for the next post, where I break down each theme, what I liked and disliked, and what code I wrestled with. It’s a little longer than this post, which is why it’s split up.

    By the way, the title is thanks to Ryan, who took my joke seriously.

    http://twitter.com/Ipstenu/status/193061445762691072

    http://twitter.com/ryangiglio/status/193061904686649344

  • Don’t Use WWW

    Don’t Use WWW

    It was asked why I don’t recommend using www in your URL for Multisite in WP Multisite 101.

    To quote me:

    You should not use www in your URL
    A lot of people complain about this. The simple fact is that any well built server will automatically redirect www.example.com to example.com seamlessly. By removing it from our install, we avoid any possible conflicts with subdomains. Your SEO will not be impacted.

    What I didn’t say, but I told the fellow with the question, is that some servers see www as a subdomain, and not an ‘alias’ (for lack of a better term) of example.com, which is my main reason for not using it. I’ve also seen a very rare, but infuriating, problem where, after upgrading, a site that happens to use www in their URL can no longer get to the network admin page, and instead gets a redirection loop. Since this only happens with www in the URL, and never when it’s not, it’s safer to drop the www.

    I’ve never yet heard a good technical reason to use it, though I do totally accept ‘But I like it!’ as a justification. Everyone has a preference. I don’t feel that the www makes your site more or less professional, mostly because I don’t think anyone really looks except, maybe, you. As long as the redirect is seamless, the user will never notice, and 99.999% of them won’t care. Yes, Google and Facebook both use the www, though newer sites like Tumblr and Twitter don’t. WordPress doesn’t, but I’ve been advocating no-www longer than I’ve used WordPress.

    My technical reasons for not using it stem from the No WWW guys.

    By default, all popular Web browsers assume the HTTP protocol. In doing so, the software prepends the ‘http://’ onto the requested URL and automatically connect to the HTTP server on port 80. Why then do many servers require their websites to communicate through the www subdomain? Mail servers do not require you to send emails to recipient@mail.domain.com. Likewise, web servers should allow access to their pages though the main domain unless a particular subdomain is required.

    Succinctly, use of the www subdomain is redundant and time consuming to communicate. The internet, media, and society are all better off without it.

    To explain what that means, www used to be the protocol to say ‘If data comes for www.example.com, it’s web traffic.’ Similarly, mail is the protocol for email, and mail.example.com sends traffic to your mail server. You could email me at mail.halfelf.org. And the point of all that all web browsers today know that http://example.com is a website. In fact, you can just type example.com into any browser, and it’ll know ‘Oh, this is a website.’ How does it know that? Because you’re in a web browser.

    It’s like when you dial a phone number, you don’t have to press a button to say ‘Phone number.’ Look at your cell phone. If you open up your text messaging app, enter a cell phone number, and send a message, the phone magically knows ‘This is a text!’ and sends it. But if you open the phone app and enter the exact same number, it knows ‘This is a phone call!’ You, the user, have to do nothing.

    That www in your URLs is telling the browser something it already knows. It’s redundant, it takes up space, and it’s unnecessary.

    Now people I respect, like Michael Hampton, maker of Bad Behavior (my out and out favorite add-on to any PHP web app), is the brain behind Yes WWW. His counter argument concludes with:

    The main reason I argue for leaving the www. in URLs is that it serves as a gentle reminder that there are other services than the Web on the Internet. Some of these, such as FTP and DNS, users typically use transparently without even realizing it. Others, such as e-mail, users access through separate applications. Even so, I know of many users who will claim with a straight face that e-mail is not part of the Internet.

    While I disagree (mostly since, if that holds true, we should use mail.example.com and so on), the question comes up that if we’re not using www, how do we differentiate between http://example.com and ftp://example.com in cases where they’re not on the same server? You can, easily, redirect ftp.example.com to a different IP, if needed, via DNS. Thankfully, there are some easy answers to this. First, you can route the requests via ports. If a request comes via FTP, that’s a different port, send it to the other server. What you can’t do, however, is serve HTTP and FTP over the same port, but … you shouldn’t do that anyway.

    There are many personal reasons to use www or non-www, and they are all perfectly valid. But there’s on big technical reason I would never consider it on a Multisite install of WordPress. Once in a blue moon, after an upgrade, someone finds out they can’t get to their network admin. This is, normally, due to a miss-match in URLs, where they’ve put http://example.com and http://www.example.com for their site and home URLs, back before they turned on Multisite. Fixing that is a monumental effort, and it doesn’t always take. (This is probably related to http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/9873 now that I think about it.) Also, even more rare is the case where just having the www forces your subdomains to be subdomain.www.example.com.

    Both situations are frustrating. Both are avoidable by using just http://example.com

    As long as you redirect the www to non-www, your users will never notice. Except the geeks like me. And while we may disagree, it’s unlikely we’ll stop using your site over something that trivial. Go www free. It’s the way to be.

  • You Never Try “Everything”

    You Never Try “Everything”

    Analogy time, kids!

    You go to the doctor and you’re trying to quit smoking. “I’ve tried everything!” you say. What do they ask you? “Well, what did you try?”

    That’s both a useless explanation from you, and a frustrating reply from your doctor.

    The point is you never try ‘everything.’ Ever. It’s just impossible. And while I understand you say things like that as hyperbole, it’s a useless thing to say in a support forum. The number of posts I’ve seen with ‘I tried everything, so don’t suggest…’ drive me up the wall. What you really did was try everything that you could think of. Which means me, without being able to know what you could think of (i.e. I’m not psychic), has to ask “Okay, list it.”

    Pink Pony PressThat sort of report is often called a ‘Shrug Report.’ Something you normally get with the words ‘It doesn’t work.’ It’s useless information that doesn’t help anyone debug. It just means we have to ask more questions and pester you, when you’re already clearly annoyed. In your inability to state what the issue is and what you’ve done, you make it harder for yourself.

    So how can you ask for help correctly?

    Back to the analogy.

    “Doc I’m trying to quit smoking. I tried cutting down, then I tried bringing only a certain number to work, then I put all my ashtrays outside, then I threw out all my lighters. I tried that gum, too. Every time I got a craving, I took a piece. I just can’t seem to quit. What can I do?”

    Now you’ve given us something we can work with, and the doctor will ask things like, “Do you find it hardest not to smoke in specific places or times?”

    These are leading questions, ones that should make you start to think about the bigger picture. If you only have trouble at the end of the day, thats different than having a problem every time you walk past a smoker or smell cigarettes.

    When you ask for support, you should keep in mind that very rarely do two people have the exact same problem. I know this sounds weird, since you can think of the number of people who successfully solve issues with tech support scripts, but the disturbing truth is that most of those are blind luck, and the rest are people who can’t be bothered to search on an error message.

    The secret sauce to getting the best help possible is easy.

    First, drop any attitude you might have.

    You’re asking for help. You don’t ‘deserve’ support, not even for companies you paid. That we happen to get help instead of being told ‘figure it out.’ is a miracle. But the notion that ‘I got this from you so you must help me!’ is a false one, and puts too much stress on everyone. Forget it. Be a nice person and remember there’s a living human at the end of the line. Don’t be a dick starts with you.(Someone recently accused me of not ‘assuming good faith’ and honestly I don’t. I’d love to, but if, out of the gate, your attitude rubs me raw, I’ll walk away before dealing with you, because you feel like a dick to me. And while I always attest that it’s half-me/half-you, it’s still half-you. If more than one person says you have a bad attitude, take a good hard look at yourself. They’re probably right. I’m called a bitch a lot, and I usually smile and thank them. I am Brave, Intelligent, Tenacious, Creative and Honest. But I also feel no need to spend time on and with people I don’t like. I don’t have to like you. The point to this Melvillian digression is that I won’t have to assume good faith if you’re not acting like a dick.) People are going to help you, so you should be kind in the beginning.

    Every time I’ve up front said “I screwed up, can you help me?” in a sincerely humble manner, I’ve had the best results. I need your help, I’m going to be nice to you to get it, and I’ll probably thank you later.

    Second, state your problem clearly and with detail.

    It’s okay not to really know what’s going on, or all the technical terms, but you should have an idea of what’s not working ‘right.’ “I’m trying to add a user to my system and I get an error.” Okay, that’s a good start. You should include the version of the system, the error message, though, so try “I’m trying to add a user to System Foo, version 2.3, and when I do, I get this error: blah.” Awesome!

    Third, list what changed.

    Don’t say nothing. Something changed. Something happened. While yes, anything can ‘just break’ it’s not that common, so take the time to review. When was the last time you tried to do this? If, using our previous example, you last added a user in January, what’s changed since then? A lot, right? Well, we actually need to know what all changed. And when, that would be nice. In order to know what changed, you have to keep track of everything that changes, and when it happened. It’s work, I know, but you should make sure to add in “This is the first time since January I’ve tried to add a user, and since then, I’ve upgraded X component, add in feature Z, and removed function A.” Remember our Hecht! (Herbert Hecht wrote, in Rare Conditions – An Important Cause of Failures,  that “rarely executed code has a much higher failure rate (expressed in execution time) than frequently executed code during the early operational period.” This was mentioned in Failure of Imagination, back in January 2011.)

    Fourth, list what you tried.

    We already talked about this, so you know what to do. List it. Everything. It may be long, but it’ll be helpful. You don’t need an example on how to list what you did, just keep track of it while you’re doing it, or put in a caveat “What I know I tried…”

    Fifth, be willing to try anything.

    To get all the way back to that doctor analogy, if your doctor says ‘We should try putting you on this medication to help you quit smoking,’ then you need to shut up and listen to the doctor! The doctor’s been around a lot longer than you, the doctor has studied and proven their worth, and not killed anyone (yet). So maybe, just maybe, the doctor knows what they’re talking about. If you find yourself bring up ‘But on the internet I read…’ arguments, sit on your hands, make a backup, and try it.

    What about you? What are your tricks to giving good information to get good help?

  • Fork With Restraint

    Fork With Restraint

    I love that the GPL lets you fork. In fact, two of my plugins are forks and one’s an adoption. I think that’s one of the best things about GPL, the freedom to adapt and move on. But every single time you fork a plugin, you cause a couple problems that many people are either ignorant of or just don’t care about.

    Confusion

    If you look up ‘WP Grins’ there are three plugins. ‘WP Grins’ is the original, ‘WP Grins Lite’ is the first fork, and ‘WP Grins SSL’ is the third. Each one is pretty explanatory. The plugins are similar, but you get the idea from the title what’s different. And in each case, each forker took the time to say ‘this is what’s different’ in obvious ways, and to credit those who came before. This is important because, based on name alone, there’s not a whole lot to differentiate the plugins.

    Multiple ‘things’ with the same name is confusing. That’s really very obvious isn’t it? That’s why companies spend hours and months fighting to protect their trademarked names. The name of a ‘thing’ is important, and the difference between the names is the crux of everything. In a predominantly text world, your name is everything.

    Bad Feelings

    This is where it gets weird. As you all know, I’m a huge supporter of forking. But sometimes when you fork, you’re a dick. There are a lot of weird things to consider when you fork, and for me, the first one is ‘Is the plugin I’m forking something you pay for?’ Generally speaking, if I’m even considering forking a for-pay plugin, I’ll try to start up a dialogue with the developers first, because I know that these people are trying to make a living, and I’m a dick if I take that away from them. Yes, GPL says I can do it anyway, but there’s the law and then there’s the community.

    A lot of the time we tout the ‘spirt’ of GPL and I really hate that. We’re actually touting the cohesiveness of the community. That we know plugins are often free, but pay for support, or behind a pay wall, or a million other things. But. If you take away someone’s ability to make a living, you are a raging dick.

    Strong words, but ones I firmly believe in. It’s no secret I’m not fond of the IncSub folks and their behind-a-paywall/yearly fee for plugins. My issue isn’t their code, however, or their prices, but their attitude. And while I don’t like them, I will support till my dying day their right to do it. And if someone logs in to their site, gets an account, downloads everything and then puts it up on their own site, well, I’ll support IncSub in kicking them while they’re down, because it’s just not nice.(This actually happened in November 2011.)

    As Jane Wells put it:

    The GPL does allow for redistribution of GPL code. You can even charge for it if you like. However, here at WordPress.org that sort of behavior is not encouraged or supported in our repo. If you redistribute, we expect to see modifications not available in the original. We show respect for the authors of GPL code by only promoting redistributions that are useful as new contributions through helpful modifications.

    Which is why, when I forked the plugins I did, I made clear changes. Works on SSL now! Works on Multisite! And none were pay-for.

    But what does ‘being nice’ have to do with this?

    It Pays to Be Nice

    WordPress’s strength is their community. It’s the people who dream and invent, and the GPL has given those people tremendous amounts of freedom to be creative and expressive. Where WordPress runs into problem is personality conflicts and clashes (even the smartest people can be assholes). And where you will see the most of those conflicts and clashes is when it comes to GPL and who has the ‘right’ to do whatever. (Second only to GPL is SEO.) Once you incur the ire of a community, your ‘cred’ drops amazingly. That’s why so many of us are accused of ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’ when we tout the GPL party line.

    A quote in my comment ‘guidelines’ is from Lord Buckley, “If you know what to do and you don’t do it, there you bloody well are, aren’t you?” We all know the right things to do are to be good people. To respect each other and treat our fellow man with kindness. I don’t care what religion you are, or even if you worship the FSM. The only way we all get through this thing called life is to be decent people. Taking away someone’s source of income is rarely nice, and when you do it and say ‘I did this because it’s GPL and I can!’ then you’ve done it for the wrong reasons. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. We all learned that as children, that just because I can throw a rock at Timmy’s head doesn’t mean I should.

    Theft

    When we get to college, many of us experiment, for the first time, with being able to walk away from things we don’t want to do, even though we should (like your classes). And many times, these young adult challenges, where we do the wrong thing, come with no serious repercussions, and we determine that it’s okay to break some rules. This curious attitude follows us into adult life. It’s okay to steal cable/music/movies because the companies that provide them make a lot of money, and the artist never sees it anyway, so we’re not hurting the people who really matter.

    Taking someone’s product that is for sale, making a change and giving it away, is perfectly acceptable in the GPL. But that doesn’t make it right. That makes it legalized theft, and it will hurt your standing in the community. And that’s what people mean by the ‘spirit’ of GPL. You and me and everyone else who writes code or contributes are the spirit of GPL. And when you hurt one of us, you hurt us all.

    Go ahead and fork plugins, it’s what makes WordPress, and any GPL product great. But when you fork, do it for the right reasons, and remember that the developer you’re forking from is a person too.

    Treat them how you’d like to be treated.

  • Pretty URLs Matter

    Pretty URLs Matter

    Just over a year ago, Lifehacker changed their site and we all learned about the hashbang. I believed that pretty URLs mattered:

    I would posit that, since the web is based on look and feel, the design of your site still relies, in part, on the ease of someone in understanding the URL.

    Well Dan Webb agrees with me: (It’s About The Hashbangs)

    After quite a lot of thought and some attention to some of the issues that surround web apps that use hashbang URLs I’ve come to conclusion that it most definitely is about the hashbangs. This technique, on its own, is destructive to the web. The implementation is inappropriate, even as a temporary measure or as a downgrade experience.

    This Dan guy happens to be in charge of switching Twitter from the #! back into nice, normal, readbale URLs:

    You can read the whole Twitter convo on Storify. But the take-away is, I admit, a little dance from me of ‘I told you so.’

    In the comments of my previous post, someone pointed out that Google uses Hashbangs in a search. I have not seem them in my searches (here’s an example of what I do see on page 3 of a search for ‘sadasdas’):

    https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&
    q=sadasdas#q=sadasdas&hl=en&prmd=imvns&ei=8CthT86EEoWDgwerpqDwDA&
    start=20&sa=N&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=6b8f6c2ef22f8dde&
    biw=1324&bih=879

    The thing is, Google doesn’t matter in this instance. Actually, none of Googles URLs ever really matter when it comes to the reasons we want Pretty URLs. Remember our credos?

    URLs are important. Yes, they are, but they’re important when you’re looking for something. They should be important on, say, YouTube, and they certainly are important on Google Code pages. But for a normal Google search? You don’t type in google.com/ipstenu or even google.com/search/ipstenu to find pages about ipstenu (Though, really, that would be really awesome if you could! At the very least, the 404 should have a ‘Do you want to search for that?’ options. Get on it, Google Monkeys!) Which is the point I was trying to make. When you go to a site for specific content, you want people to say ‘Go to ipstenu.org/about’ and be done with it.

    URLs are forever. Again, yes they are, except when they’re not. For Google? This doesn’t matter. They don’t search themselves, and rarely do I know people who bookmark a Google search. But… Did you know Googles search URL formats are backwards compatible? That’s right. If you had an old URL saved, it would still be usable.

    Cool URLs don’t change. Except for search URLs. But Google knows if you’ve gotta change ’em, make ’em backwards compatible. Ben Cherry has a nice article on why it’s good, too, which I found enlightening. I still don’t like them on the front end of websites, mind you, for a reason Ben points out:

    The hashbang also brings a tangible benefit. Someday, we will hopefully be rid of the thing, when HTML5 History (or something like it) is standard in all browsers. The Web application is not going anywhere, and the hash is a fact of life.

    That’s the problem right there. We’re building something we know is going to go away! We just broke a credo!

    Are there ever reasons for using Hashbangs? Sure, but most of us will never need them. They’re great for loading AJAX which is awesome because you can load new parts of your site faster. Heck, WordPress has some AJAXification, but it’s primarily on the backend. They’re fantastic for web apps and they have some attractive functionality. But they don’t work for everyone, and they never will.

    The ‘replacement’ is HTML5, which introduces pushState, which lets you use a JavaScript library with HTML5 history.pushState and … well basically you write an app with that instead of AJAX and the Hashbang, your URLs stay pretty and your page can still have that nice ‘click to add the new tweets’ functionality that we’ve all seen on the new-new-new-Twitter. And Facebook.

    See, pushState is giving us these three things (among others):

    • better looking urls: A ‘real’, bookmarkable, ‘server-reachable’ url.
    • graceful degradation: Render correct pages when you don’t have JS enabled.
    • faster loading: By only loading parts of the page, slow-net users can get the content faster.

    The downside? It doesn’t work on IE right now. That’s okay, though, since it’s got graceful degradation, IE users will just have to manually refresh things. Which sucks for IE users, but perhaps will be the fire under Microsoft’s feet to get on that one.

    Keep an eye out in your webapps. They’ll be moving over to this sooner than you think.

  • GPL – Oh Dear God

    GPL – Oh Dear God

    I come to code from a strange direction. I was a fangirl and I learned all about webpages because of that. Perhaps it’s because of that humble begining that I look at the GPL arguments much as I look at ‘shipping’ arguments in fandom. Shipping is when fans believe a relationship to exist between two characters, regardless of anything being scripted. A great example of this is Xena: Warrior Princess. Some people thought Xena and Gabrielle were a couple. Some people didn’t. When the two argued, there were fireworks. Now, with shipping, sometimes a miracle occurs and the couple do get together (see Mulder/Scully in The X-Files and Grissom/Sara in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation), but most of the time the arguments go on for eternity.

    That’s pretty much how GPL arguments make me feel. Ad nasuem. I hate them, and I was sorely tempted to post this with comments turned off. But various people asked me my opinion and that they’d like to see this posted, so… you’re masochists. This all started with Rarst asking me what I thought about a GPLv2 vs GPLv3 in a trac ticket in WordPress to fix plugins about page license requirement. I should note that he and I don’t see eye to eye about GPL, and we’re still pretty friendly.

    Here’s the thing. I don’t have a horse in this race. GPLv2, GPLv3, MIT, Apache, whatever. I don’t have a license I love beyond measure. You see, I work for The Man, and having done so for 13 years, I have an acceptance of things I can’t change. One of those things is ‘This is how we do things.’ You accept that, even if things aren’t the most efficient, or even if they’re not the way you’d do them if you could choose, this is what they are.

    I view the GPL issue in WordPress with the same antipathy. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I accept the rules for what they are and I have no reason to rock the boat. WordPress says ‘If you want to be in our repositories, and you want to be supporting our official stuff, you have to play by our rules.’ This is good business sense, it’s good branding, and it’s self-protection. With that in mind, I recently changed a plugin of mine to use code that was MIT licensed.

    Expat License (#Expat)

    This is a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL. It is sometimes ambiguously referred to as the MIT License. (MIT License compatibility with GPLv2)

    That’s easy enough. But I’m sure you’ve heard people argue that GPLv3 and GPLv2 are incompatible, or Apache is, and those are true statements. Because they’re incompatible, however, does not mean you can’t use them together, it means you can’t incorporate them!

    Let me explain. No. Let’s let Richard Stallman explain:

    When we say that GPLv2 and GPLv3 are incompatible, it means there is no legal way to combine code under GPLv2 with code under GPLv3 in a single program. This is because both GPLv2 and GPLv3 are copyleft licenses: each of them says, “If you include code under this license in a larger program, the larger program must be under this license too.” There is no way to make them compatible. We could add a GPLv2-compatibility clause to GPLv3, but it wouldn’t do the job, because GPLv2 would need a similar clause.

    Fortunately, license incompatibility only matters when you want to link, merge or combine code from two different programs into a single program. There is no problem in having GPLv3-covered and GPLv2-covered programs side by side in an operating system. For instance, the TeX license and the Apache license are incompatible with GPLv2, but that doesn’t stop us from running TeX and Apache in the same system with Linux, Bash and GCC. This is because they are all separate programs. Likewise, if Bash and GCC move to GPLv3, while Linux remains under GPLv2, there is no conflict.

    What does that mean? It means I could write a plugin in GPLv3 and use it with the GPLv2 (or later) WordPress and not have any issues. However what I cannot do is take that code, put it into WordPress, and distribute it as a new version of WP Core. And that’s (most of) why we shouldn’t have the GPLv3 plugins in the WordPress repository. The fact is that often new core features get their start as plugins, and if we allow GPLv3 in there, we run the risk of breaking licensing.

    Worse, if we get our ideas from a GPLv3 plugin and rewrite it to GPLv2, we still are at risk for violation. This is the same reason, to bring it back to fandom, why authors can’t read fanfiction. If they use your ideas, you can sue them. We have enough headaches with Hello Dolly, let’s not add to them. And before someone thinks I’m overreacting about that, I wish I was. I’ve watched copyright wars before, seen friends lose their websites over it, and I can’t imagine that a TV show would be less agressive than a software company when they feel their rights have been infringed. It’s terrible, but it’s the reality of the litigious society in which we live.

    So why don’t we just move WordPress to GPLv3?

    If it helps to think of software in a different way, pretend you have two versions of server software, Server 2.0 and Server 3.0. You can use the files from Server 2.0 on the box with Server 3.0, but you can’t use Server 2.0 files on Server 3.0. They’re not backwards compatible. That’s the first problem with GPLv3, we’d have to make sure every single bit of code in WordPress is able to be moved to GPLv3.

    This is clarified in the GPLv3 FAQ: (GPLv3 FAQ Update – Converting GPLv2 to GPLv3)

    I have a copy of a program that is currently licensed as “GPLv2, or (at your option) any later version.” Can I combine this work with code released under a license that’s only compatible with GPLv3, such as ASL 2.0?
    Once GPLv3 has been released, you may do this. When multiple licenses are available to you like this, you can choose which one you use. In this case, you would choose GPLv3.

    If you do this, you may also want to update the license notices. You have a number of options:

    • You may leave them as they are, so the work is still licensed under “GPLv2, or (at your option) any later version.” If you do, people who receive the work from you may remove the combination with parts that are only compatible with GPLv3, and use the resulting work under GPLv2 again.

      If you do this, we suggest you include copies of both versions of the GPL. Then, in a file like COPYING, explain that the software is available under “GPLv2, or (at your option) any later version,” and provide references to both the included versions. If you have any additional restrictions, per section 7 of GPLv3, you should list those there as well.

    • You may update them to say “GPLv3, or (at your option) any later version.” At this point, any versions of the work based on yours can only be licensed under GPLv3 or later versions. Include a copy of GPLv3 with the software.
    • You may also update them to say “GPLv3” only, with no upgrade option, but we recommend against this. Include a copy of GPLv3 with the software.

    That doesn’t sound terrible, does it? You can go from GPLv3 to GPLv2, so long as you remove all the GPLv3-and-up code. Backwards compatibility is complicated, and forward isn’t much better. The second problem is the bigger one. From the GPLv3 FAQ: (GPLv3 FAQ Update – permission to change release)

    Consider this situation: 1. X releases V1 of a project under the GPL. 2. Y contributes to the development of V2 with changes and new code based on V1. 3. X wants to convert V2 to a non-GPL license. Does X need Y’s permission?
    Yes. Y was required to release its version under the GNU GPL, as a consequence of basing it on X’s version V1. nothing required Y to agree to any other license for its code. Therefore, X must get Y’s permission before releasing that code under another license.

    And why would WordPress want to switch to GPLv3 anyway? Other than having more licenses compatible with GPLv3 than GPLv2, the other main differences didn’t strike me as anything WordPress needs. You can read ifrOSS’s document and come up with your own opinion, of course. Basically in order to get WordPress moved to GPLv3, every single person who ever submitted code to WordPress has to be contacted and sign off on the change. Now, unless a clever lawyer type can argue that the act of submitted code to core reliquieshes your ‘ownership’ thereof, and the code becomes community

    code maintained and manged by WordPress, and as such WordPress does not need to gain consent from all contributors, then maybe  this can be done. But that’s a long, mess, legal conversation.

    Finally, the real question is who are we protecting here? Remember, GPL is not about the developer but the user. The extra ‘freedoms’ that come in GPLv3 don’t really strike me as being about the user, and that worries me a little. Patent protection, permitting code to be kept from the end user, and tivoization are all great things for a developer who puts out the code, but as the person who wants to adapt it later, that sure feels pretty restrictive to me.

    Will I use GPLv3 ever? Sure. But not in my WordPress code.