Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Tag: open source

  • SVN up your install on Lion

    LingonAppCron isn’t reliable, since Apple uses launchd. I’m not the only person who grumbles about this. I know cron. I don’t know launchd, having never had a reason to learn it, so this took some doing. And no, I’m not using a GUI app to write this stuff for me, like LingonApp, since ti feel if I do that I won’t learn how it works.

    My goal was simple: Update my local copy of an app (WordPress) when I logged into my computer. Obviously this won’t work if I have no access to the Internet, but that’s okay.

    I made a file called wordpress.svn.updater.plist and put it in ~/Library/LaunchAgents/

    The content of the file is as follows:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>wordpress.svn.updater</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>svn</string>
<string>update</string>
<string>/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/</string>
</array>
<key>RunAtLoad</key>
<true/>
</dict>
</plist>

    So basically every time I log in, SVN updates my install of WordPress, which is in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/ as I’m using MAMP. I tried it with ~/Sites/localhost/ which is an ln link back to the MAMP folder, but according to Console (where I read my error messages), that didn’t work. If I hard coded the path, though, it was fine.

  • GPL Freedoms – Yep, Porn’s Good!

    Did you know you can use WordPress for a porn site?

    Did you know you can use Drupal to show autopsy pictures?

    The freedoms of GPL don’t just extend to the software itself, but to how you use it. See, most of the time when we talk about GPL freedom, we’re talking about how you’re free to take the code and turn it into a monkey if you want to. But lately, there’s been an effort to remind people that part of GPL also means we don’t restrict your usage either.

    WordPress has a link to ‘Freedoms’ at the footer of all admin pages, and that duplicates the Bill of Rights found at WordPress’s Philosophy:

    WordPress is licensed under the General Public License (GPLv2 or later) which provides four core freedoms, consider this as the WordPress “bill of rights”:

    • The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
    • The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
    • The freedom to redistribute.
    • The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.

    Drupal doesn’t spell it out as clearly, but given that they have fetchgals, which can pull in thumbnails of porno pics (if I read that right), I feel confident to say that Drupal doesn’t care what you use Drupal for. Joolma! puts a lot of stock in people using their product for their communities and nowhere did I find note of a limitation of what you cannot do.

    The point is valid, however. You can use WordPress, Drupal, Joomla! and pretty much any GPL software for whatever purpose you want, moral or immoral, legal or illegal. This is interesting when you compare it to most EULAs, like Microsoft Office:

    7. SCOPE OF LICENSE. The software is licensed, not sold. This agreement only gives you some rights to use the features included in the software edition you licensed. Microsoft reserve reserves all other rights. Unless applicable law gives you more rights despite this limitation, you may use the software only as expressly permitted in this agreement. In doing so, you must comply with any technical limitations in the software that only allow you to use it in certain ways. You may not
    […]
    • use the software in any way that is against the law;

    GPL doesn’t tell you that you can’t use it in a way that’s illegal, and perhaps Microsoft only does to escape a potential lawsuit for someone saying “Aha! You used Office to draft your Mainifesto!” We live in over litigious times. Open Source, by telling us ‘Do what you want, it’s not our beef.’ removes themselves from those issues cleanly and without ass hattery.

    One of the tenets of American Law is our freedom to speak our mind. Part of being an American Citizen is that you have the right to defend your beliefs, no matter how much I oppose them, and so long as no one breaks the law, that’s fine. I can ask you to leave my house if you do it on my private property, and you can ask me to leave yours. But if we meet on the street I cannot have you arrested for that. I will defend your freedoms just as you must defend mine, regardless of any agreement or lack there of.

    This applies to Open Source because I have the right to use WordPress, Drupal or Joomla! in ways you may find distasteful. As long as I’m not violating the agreement of my ISP, the laws of where my server is located, and the laws of my nation, I’m allowed to call you names, insult your heritage, and show nudie pics of pretty girls. On the other hand, I cannot publish your personal information (it’s a violation of invasion of privacy) and I cannot post naked pictures of you without your consent. Actually, my webhost won’t permit and naked pictures at all, so there’s that.

    So when you see a site run by WordPress, Drupal or Joomla! that’s doing something you hate, there’s very little you can do about it. Report it to their webhost if you think it’s breaking the law, but otherwise celebrate people in their freedom.

  • Risk Theater and Open Source Testing

    Risk Theater and Open Source Testing

    Audits Are Fun!We make multiple test environments and platforms, testing with hundreds of users.  We perform stress tests (how much traffic can my site take?), and have an obscene amount of checks and balances to ensure that only code that is good makes it into the file product.  We have teams who question every change asking “Do you need this?” or “What’s this function for?”  We audit every update process and ensure that our work is as good as we can make it.  This is all done, we say, to reduce our risk.  Our software, we insist, will be better if we do all these things.

    But the failure rate has not dropped.

    Initially, when a product is released, there’s a spike of failures.  We didn’t anticipate that, or this didn’t work like we expected it to.  Those are not classified as ‘failures’ but as kinks to be ironed out.  Six or seven months down the line, we’ve released another set of itterations to fix the worst offenders and our failure rate drops to a comfortable rate where, most of the time, everything’s fine.

    What if I told you that one in five IT projects was a success?(Source: Statistics over IT Failure Rate)

    What if I told you that all your myriad checks, balances, testing, forms and CYA dances didn’t make anything less risky?

    What if I told you it was all Risk Theater.

    Of course you can do things in a less risky way.  If given the choice between dismantling a bomb in a nice quiet room, where you have all the time in the world and a blast shield, or doing it on the back of a van while being shot at and you only have 30 seconds, everyone would point at that room and say ‘Less risky!’  And they’d be right.  The problem with risk is that there are often, if not always, external forces that perpetuate risk.

    We have to ask ourselves “What is risk?”  We can look at it mathematically.  Risk = {si, λi, xi} – and most of us have no idea what that means.  Risk is not a magical number that says “Defusing a bomb is this risky.”  Determining risk is how we discern how likely something is to happen, and from that, what is the likelihood of an unwelcome outcome.

    Too often risk is defined as risk = likelihood * consequence and safety = 1-risk

    This can misinform: acceptable risk is a consideration of likelihood ANDconsequence, not a simple multiplication with safety as the additive inverse of risk. Acceptable risk and safety are normative notions, changing with situations and expectations, and must be assessed accordingly. (Source: Woody’s Perspective – by Steven A. “Woody” Epstein)

    Risk analysis, for all it’s a mathematical discipline, is just that.  A discipline.  That means the numbers matter far less than you think they do, and if all you do is look at the numbers and say “But we’ve predicted a five point uptime!” then you’re ignorant of the truth.(A five point uptime refers to the claim people make of providing 99.99999% uptime.  The five 9s after the decimal point are feel-good numbers/)  The trick to it all is that variation is something computers are phenomenally bad at handling.  Look at your computer.  It’s what can be best described as a ‘brittle’ system.  If you throw something a computer’s never seen before, it tends to react poorly, because unlike the human brain, it can’t adapt or improvise.  It can’t know “Oh, you meant ‘yes’ when you typed ‘yea’” unless some programmer has put in a catch for that.  On some systems, it may not even know the difference between an uppercase Y and a lowercase y.

    Variation in LeavesVariation is nature.  It’s reality.  It’ll never go away, either.  The point of risk analysis is not to come up with that number to say ‘By doing foo, we are x% less risky.’  The point is to look at the system and understand it better.  The point is to learn.  The act of explaining and defining the process, whatever it is from changing a tire to pushing software to a few hundred servers, is what makes a process less risky.  You understand what it is you’re doing, and you can explain it to someone so they too can understand it, and now you know what you’re doing.  The numbers will come, but they’ll also change over time due to variation.

    We mitigate our risk by understanding, testing and documenting.  But just as you can never have 100% uptime on a system (you have to upgrade it at some point), you cannot excise risk entirely.  On the other hand, we cannot ignore the need for testing.

    A woman named Lisa Norris died due to a software error, caused by a lack of testing.  All the safety checks, the manual monitoring and brainpower failed because the automated system wasn’t tested.  Prior to the automated system going online, the old way was for people to manually transcribe medical dosage.  This was felt to be ‘high risk’ because there was a risk of transcription error.  However nowhere in the incident report were any ‘manual errors’ noted, prior to the automated system being used. We can assume, then, that any manual errors (i.e. transcription errors, the risk the system was meant to abrogate) were caught in-flight and corrected.  The automated system does not appear to have ever been tested with ‘real world’ scenarios (there’s no documentation to that affect that anyone investigating the situation had found).  If they had run simulations, testing with data from the previous, manual system, they may have found the errors that lead to a woman’s death. (Source: Lisa Norris’ Death by Software Changes – by Steven A. “Woody” Epstein)

    There remains a possibility, however, that even with all the testing in the world, that the error that led to Miss Norris’ death would have been missed.  So how do we make testing better?  As long as we’re only testing for the sake of testing (i.e. it’s expected, so we do it), or we follow the standard test plan, we miss the point of dry testing.  Even people who stick by their ridgid test scripts are missing the point.

    Open Source software, however, gets the point.

    Monkeys sans keyboardsYou see, we know we can’t test everything, and we know that we’re going to miss that one variation on a server where code that works a hundred times on a ninety-nine servers will fail on that one where it has a tiny difference.  And yet, if a million monkeys banging on a million keyboards could write Hamlet, then why can’t they fix software?  They can help cure AIDS, we know.  Crowd sourcing knowledge means that you let the monkeys bang on your data and test it in ways you never imagined it being used.  No longer driven by a salary (and that really does lock your brain in weird ways), the monkeys (and I’m one of them), cheerfully set up rigs where we can roll back quickly if things break, and start just using the iterations of software, coming up with weird errors in peculiar situations.

    We always talk about how we want to lower the bar and make products more accessible to more people.  Make it easier for them to use.  In order to sustain that model, we need to embrace the inherent risk of software and teach the users how to correctly perform basic troubleshooting and report real errors.  To often we write our code in a vacuum, test it in a limited fashion, and release into the wild knowing there will be a second release to fix things.  As development matures, we push out more changes more often, small changes, so people are eased into that new thing.  We step out of isolation and embrace the varations of how our product will be used.

    Now we need to get our users to step out of their isolation and join the monkeys.  We can’t make things better for everyone unless everyone is a part of the improvement process.  We must ease these users into understanding that every software product is ‘in progress’, just like we taught them to accept that all webpages are perpetually ‘under construction.’  Our dry tests will never be complete until we can determine how to safely bring them in.  Maybe we make smaller changes every day, like Google does with Chrome, such that they never notice.  Or maybe we ask them to ‘check the box to join our test group and get cool features before everyone else!’  But we must do it, or we will fall behind in giving the users what they want, and giving them a solid, safe, secure product.

    Until then, we’re not analyzing or assessing actual risk, we’re merely players in risk theater.

  • The Morality of Forking

    The Morality of Forking

    Having already established that Forking is Legal, I felt it best to take the other end of the argument.(This was intended to be all one post, but at about 3000 words, it needed to be split up.)

    Clarification here. Jigoshop is a product of Jigowatt. I call them Jigoshop in both my posts because it’s easier for my brain.

    Gil Rutkowski remarked (without knowing I was already writing this):

    Funny how people pick and choose between the “SPIRIT” of the GPL and its literal legal application to fit their argument. (@flashingcursor on Twitter)

    Two ForksWe often sum up GPL as “Do what you want with this software. Just let other people do what they want with the software you make from it.” If you’re not familiar with it, I think I can sum up the spirit of GPL as “Don’t be a dick.” (Wil Wheaton in Exile) People get in a lot of arguments about the ‘spirit’ of things. You’ve probably heard someone complain “He’s following the letter of the law, but not the spirit.” Basically what that means is someone is obeying the law, but not what it means.

    How can that even be? If the law is the law, then the law is the law and there should be no wibbly wobbly involved! It happens because of intent. The intent of the law in general is really something we shouldn’t have needed to be told in the first place, when you think about it. Primum non nocere: First, do no harm. Doctors are taught this, and you’d really think that’s self-evident! And yet, even the US Declaration of Independence starts out “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” If they were self-evident, why are we saying thing?

    People are selfish. We care about ourselves first, then the people closest to us, and so on and so forth. To say the ‘spirit’ of the law means we’re no longer actually talking about the law as a legislative statute, but about the idiomatic application there of. We’re now talking about how we feel the law should be, which is pretty iffy territory. Talking about the spirit of the law brings up things like the moral ambiguity of the law, and the ethics we try to impose on others. What’s ethical for me may not be so for you, and so on.

    So what does the moral aspect of GPL have to do with the recent forking of Jigoshop’s eCommerce plugin? Interestingly we can see how both parties ended up at the fork because they were selfish. Jigoshop didn’t want to give up control and neither did WooThemes. Neither was willing to concede, and in a way, they both ‘lost’ because of it.

    Melted ForkWas Woo being a dick to fork the plugin? Yes. And no. You have to keep this in perspective.

    You see, no one has made a ‘Killer’ eCommerce plugin for WordPress. Not even Jigoshop. From what I’ve been told, Woo has struggled to make their own killer plugin for eCommerce, and failed at it. I will leave it to others who actually use eCommerce on their sites to determine which plugin is queen, but I feel comfortable saying that taking someone else’s work, even when you credit them, can be a dick move.

    At the exact same time that WooThemes is being a dick for forking, they’re doing a right thing. No that’s not a typo, they are doing A thing that is right. We all know that ‘hacking core’ for WordPress (or any app) is a terrible thing. Merging changesets is a nightmare, no matter what tool you use, and a fork makes it just as hard to incorporate changes. So would not a better solution be to make a WooTheme add-on plugin that just changed the parts of Jigoshop they didn’t like? A Woo/Jigo integration plugin?

    That would be a wonderful, perfect world. Let me know when we get there. Sometimes the direction of a plugin is such that you have to fork it to do what you want. The developers don’t want to follow your dream of unicorns and puppies. Until we reach the perfect world, we fork. Now, it took a bit of reading to verify that WooThemes was unable to make their desired changes without editing core plugin code. That left them with only a few viable options. They could submit the changes to Jigoshop and hope for the best, or they could hack the Gibson. Basically, this was the best choice for WooThemes and really, nothing’s wrong with that.

    The problem is that WooThemes is going to be making money off this acquisition. Their WooCommerce plugin will be free, just like Jigoshop, but just like Jigoshop, they aim to make a living off the plugin. Off someone else’s work. To be fair, that’s what I do. I support other people’s ‘stuff’ all the time. I’ve not written a lick of code for Windows in years (except DOS and PowerShell scripts) but their products pay my bills. Does that make me a thief?

    No, it makes me an opportunist. WooThemes is being opportunistic as well. Remember how I said we are, all of us, selfish? Well so is Woo. They see a chance to make money and use a plugin that works, and not their own with a weird history. (Did you know Nacin was once going to head up WooCommerce before he was snatched by Matt? That’s fun to look at in retrospect.) Woo had a series of unfortunate issues with their own plugin, and it never worked right. They weren’t a dick because they talked to Jigoshop first (they didn’t have to), and I rather hope they said ‘Okay, we’re going to agree to disagree on the direction of the plugin and fork it.’ If Jigoshop first learned of the fork via Woo’s blog post, then they were entirely dicks.

    Was Woo being a dick to ‘head hunt’ the developers? Yes. And again, No. Yet again, perspective is important.

    I said before that the developers they ‘stole’ wouldn’t have left if they had a reason to stay. People leave companies all the time for myriad reasons. They also stay with companies for others. In the ‘traditional’ corporate world, people get a job and stay with it for a million years. In the freelance world, though, people switch jobs around a lot more. Even so, people only leave companies for three reasons:

    1. They hate it here
    2. They found something better
    3. They were let go

    That’s really it. So if someone chooses to leave a company, options one and two are there on the table, and you have to be honest to ask if they would have left if Woo hadn’t made the offer? And there’s where the dick move possibly lives. Was it Woo’s promise of skittles and beer that made them leave, or was there something wrong at Jigoshop? It’s far too early to point fingers at anyone, especially the developers who may discover they made a poor choice. You have to take risks, after all, or you never succeed.

    WooThemes was dickish if they bribed away the developers. But they weren’t if this was just one of those serendipity moments. What if the developers said ‘Wow! Woo shares our vision!’ We don’t know, so we have to speculate, but either way, the decision was the developers and not WooThemes or Jigoshop, so any dickery actually belongs to the devs and them alone.

    Twisted ForksSince I was asked, my personal opinion is this: WooThemes pulled a dick move which in no way violated the letter or the spirit of GPL.

    See the spirit would have been violated if, as another shop did recently, they lifted the plugin wholesale, made a couple tweaks, rebrand it, and released it without telling anyone. You know who I’m talking about here. That was violation of the spirit of GPL. But WooThemes was upfront about this. They talked to Jigoshop first, and everyone seems to have known what was going on before the news broke.

    While I dislike that WooThemes did this, I will defend their right to do so (and Jigoshop’s right to be upset) until the day we all stop using GPL.

    The whole reason I wrote the first post, however, was the high number of people I talked to who said that the spirit of the law was violated. It really wasn’t. Yes, these were dick moves, but the spirit of the law is the meaning, and the meaning of GPL is that you can’t impose more restrictions on a GPL product than it started with. No one did that. What Woo did was pretty shitty to their neighbor, don’t get me wrong, but it didn’t kill GPL. It hurt feelings and left a bad taste in the mouth, but that’s not the spirit of GPL either.

    The Spirit of GPL is freedom. It’s sharing your work, working together, and when you take someone’s work, being open about them and crediting them. And while you don’t have to like what Woo did, they did not harm the spirit of GPL, because we’re all here, talking about it and still abiding by it.

    I can but hope that the fallout from this is that we’ll finally have an eCommerce plugin that stands up as the best because of worth and not because that’s all we’ve got, but we’ll have to wait a couple of years for that to settle.

  • The Legality of Forking

    The Legality of Forking

    Update: This post is just about the legal aspects of forking. If you just want to talk about the morality of it, please go read The Morality of Forking.

    You may have heard about this. WooThemes hired a couple of developers who used to work for Jigoshop, and forked one of their plugins.

    Last week WooThemes announced the hiring of Mike Jolley and Jay Koster, as well as the forking of Jigoshop e-commerce plugin into the soon-to-be-released WooCommerce. Jolley and Foster previously worked for Jigowatt, a WordPress and Magento development shop, spending the last year working on the core of Jigoshop.(WP Candy: Jigoshop team and WordPress community members share thoughts on forking)

    When you read it that way, it looks a little weird, doesn’t it?  Shady even. After all, this is a case of one company cherry picking ideas from another, and then taking developers to continue working on their version.

    Here, read this view of events:

    But of course, open source makes it so easy to simply “steal” someone’s idea and hard work.  And justifying it by hiding under the umbrella of open source and “legal” forking. (WooThemes Forks Jigoshop and they brag about it)

    I’m going to go out on a limb here and present a point of view that many people will disagree with.

    It’s not theft.

    Freedom is a complicated, annoying, thing, and sometimes having a freedom means you accept the consequences of that freedom. In the US, we have freedom of speech, which means we can bitch about our government if we want to. But that also means someone else, who has the polar opposite of your views, has the exact same right you do. And I will defend that person with my dying breath that they have that right, no matter how much I detest what they’re saying.

    You have to keep that in perspective when you start talking about rights and legality. WooThemes had the legal right to do what they did. That doesn’t mean you don’t get to think that it was a dick move, and you may, but what it was, was 100% above-board. They were honest about it, and it was legal. The GPL affords us the freedom to make plugins, fork WordPress if we wanted, and do what we want, so long as we don’t restrict the freedoms even more.

    We pay a heavy price for these freedoms, don’t get me wrong. All freedoms have a cost. We all pay for them. Thomas Paine’s famous quote reflects on the ‘free’ part of open-source in a strange way: “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.” The core code of WordPress is free to us, and perhaps we devalue it for that price. Certainly the unrealistic expectations of many users is that this is a free product, and as such they deserve all things for free.

    It’s possible that many people are dismissing this forking because hey, it’s a free world! WordPress is free, the plugin was free, the plugin was GPL, we’re all free to do what we want. But WordPress, when it hands us a dizzying array of freedoms in usage, is clearly giving us liberty that can be easily abused. It’s possible this is the case of abuse of that liberty. To judge that, we have to look at the whole picture.

    Woo’s bid to buy out the Jigoshop project grossly undervalued the business and didn’t come close to covering our initial development costs, not forgetting the planning, time and effort both the Jigowatt team and community put into the project.

    Woo then made to an offer to ‘collaborate’ which led to their decision to fork Jigoshop. What hasn’t been made public is that collaboration offer included conditions which would have given WooThemes full strategic control over the direction and development of the Jigoshop project in the future. (Jigoshop: Our Forking Views)

    So clearly we can see that an offer of purchase, and collaboration, were made. They were felt to be not right. That was Jigoshop’s right and choice. Was it the correct choice? Only time will tell. That holds true of both Jigoshop and WooThemes. But up to this point, the whole deal is above-board, fair and just. And then WooThemes said ‘Well, they don’t want to work with us. That’s fair. We’re going to fork. And we’re going to take their core devs with us.’

    This is still not theft.

    See, WooThemes had no power to ‘take’ those devs unless Jigoshop undervalued them. That is Jigoshop esteemed their own developers too lightly. If the devs had been happy with their compensation, the direction of the plugin, and the company, they wouldn’t have left.

    If you are a company with an open source project gaining momentum, your core developers absolutely must have a vested interest in your company. And not 1%. It has to be a good chunk of the pie. Enough that the developers feel your company is also their company. Then if another company comes along to hire them, the developer is much more likely to tell them, “Buy the company or take a hike.” (Lessons learned from the Jigoshop – WooCommerce fiasco)

    In the corporate world, I’ve signed a contract that says, should I leave my company, there are jobs I have legally agreed not to take for 12 months following my termination. My contract also prohibits me from doing certain types of freelance work. Not that long ago, a friend complained that it wasn’t ‘fair’ that we were restricted like that. I looked at her and pointed out “No one made us sign these contracts. We read them, and we chose to sign them.”

    I’m no stranger to signing NDAs and other documents that restrict me from telling you things like who banks at the company I work for. I can tell you things that are publicly known, but not things that are not. That sounds fair, doesn’t it? I also can’t blog about my company with certain details, and on pain of being fired, I can’t talk to the press about anything. I don’t have to like it all the time, but it’s something I agreed to and that’s a choice I have to live with. Many of my friends who work in other ‘worlds’ can’t understand how a company can restrict my private life. I point out that I signed a contract that promised I wouldn’t, and I keep my promises. If I didn’t, would I be the person they liked and respected?

    No one here violated a contract, lied, cheated, or stole. So why are people chapped and are they right to be so?

    Right and wrong are tenuous. What’s right for you isn’t right for me, and that’s a part of why we have the law, which defines right for ‘everyone.’ Of course, we all know that even then, right is subjective. The law is imperfect, we know this, that’s why we have judges and jurys who listen to the situations that surround illegalities and make judgements based on not just the black and white of a situation, but the entire picture.

    What WooThemes did was legal and fair. End of story. We cannot stand and shout for the freedoms of WordPress and GPL without defending their actions. That doesn’t mean we have to like them. If this makes you decide to never support WooThemes or Jigoshop again, that’s your choice too, and one I will defend till my dying day. I feel that I should point out here that some people who are decrying WooTheme’s move are the same people who were all up in arms for Chris Pearson’s Thesis theme to abide by the GPL.

    We live by the GPL sword, and we’ll die by that sword for as long as we stay GPL. The community clearly wants to be GPL, or we’d not have gone after Thesis with such animosity. That means we have to accept that sometimes what’s right isn’t what we would do. But then again, no one’s making you use the forked plugin.

    Someone’s bound to bring up the fact that even Matt doesn’t like forking. That would be incorrect. WordPress is a fork of B2. Matt’s problem with forking is pretty easy to understand:

    Forking is not usually ideal because it fragments the market for users

    Notice how Matt doesn’t say he doesn’t like it, but that it’s not ideal? That does rather apply to this situation. By forking a plugin, you make two versions of it. Were we not all recently delighted when the TimThumb fork (WordThumb) merged with Tim to fix the problems? Were we not ecstatic when WPMU merged with WordPress to make MultiSite? Multiple plugins that do the same thing mean multiple places to have to patch.

    And yet. There are already a handful of similar plugins out there. Having competition drives people to make better products and prevents us from resting on our laurels. It’s great you made the best plugin ever, but now what? It’s true this fork may be damaging to the community, and it’s true that it may have caused hurt feelings. But what matters more is where are Jigishop and WooThemes going next? How will their plugins make themselves notably different?

    In the end, if you don’t like it, vote with your feet, but you owe it to yourself to defend everyone’s freedom with the same ferocity you defend your own. Even the people you hate.

  • You’ll Never Take My Freedom!

    You’ll Never Take My Freedom!

    I am an adherent to GPL.

    This means I understand what it means, what it protects, and what it does not. So when in the beginning of August I saw a guy selling 200 free WordPress plugins for $9, I really don’t mind. I mean, I, personally, think that selling the plugins is the wrong way to go about it.

    I will defend your right to resell MY plugin

    Look, I may think it’s a total dick move, and I may personally find it distasteful, but what I don’t find it is illegal. Morality is something else. I am legally permitted to take a plugin from another site, a paid plugin, and if it’s GPL, I can give it away, sell it, or do what I, as a user, want to do with it. Would I? Actually, yes. I have. It’s called forking a plugin. But I always attribute the authors, thank them, and point out what I did to make this plugin different.

    In fact, it’s not the reselling at all that fired up my blood. It was this one line where he says you can’t resell the plugin compilation for less, and you can’t give it away.

    It’s highly possible what he meant was ‘This set is a set, don’t steal my shit!’ And to that, yes, don’t take his hard work and steal it, that’s uncool. But where he looses his right to say that is when he tries to revoke freedoms clearly laid out in GPL, notably, I have the right to take a GPL licensed plugin and do what I want. You just can’t have it both ways.

    Don’t worry! This can be fixed!

    Otto pointed out that, as he’s also using images and other possibly non-GPL items in his product, that in a way, this is okay. Well, that’s nice, but he still can’t take away my GPL freedoms. He can do a pseudo-split license, and say “These products are GPL, and as such, all GPL freedoms remain intact. THESE products, however, are not GPL, and fall under the following provisos.” That’s a lot of work, I know, but suddenly he’s GPL-compliant! Yay!

    Of course, that assumes he had the right to use those non-GPL items in the first place. And we already knows he’s buzz-worded some BS.

    1. I have Full Master Resale Rights and Each One of the Plugins Listed Above Has Resale Privileges attached to them.

    2. Because of the Master Rights, I have the each developers expressed permission to offer Private Label Rights to All Who Purchase WP Million Dollar Plugins.

    3. Being That these are Unique & Rare Resell Rights Plugins You Have a Two-fold Benefit,
    a) The Personal Use of the WP Million Dollar Plugin
    b) The Ability to Offer This Unique/Profitable Package to Your Customers.

    The rampant abuse of capitalization aside, items number 1 and 2 there doesn’t make a lick of sense to me. First, I know that at least one plugin dev didn’t give any ‘extra’ permissions outside of what GPL already provides. So if we know this guy didn’t ask permission, what ‘master right’ does he have? Not a one, that I can come up with.

    GPL freedoms don’t require asking permission to reuse them, they don’t permit ‘private label rights’ (which actually is just marketing speak, and means nothing at all legally) or any rights that further restrict your freedoms.

    Another easy way to fix this is to not include the plugins, but instead sell it as a $10 book: The 200 best plugins for your site, how to find them, which ones to use, and why they’re great! Imagine a book that could help you get started by breaking down the best plugins for what you’re trying to do? A lot of newbies would kill for that. So sell THAT. Sell your own work. If you’ve done the research, sell it. But unless you make the plugin, or are going to support it, you’re nothing more than a hotdog vendor.

    Free is better, right?

    In the end, peer pressure reverted this $9.95 deal into a ‘free’ download by the end of the day, which I did not try (since the amount of layers to download looked like a rip off to me, and lead to a $950 … thing). No one ‘won’ anything, though. I’m sure the guy feels blasted by the people who descended upon the forums (as well as the ones who private messaged him). It’s fairly clear the forum regulars were not pleased by the onslaught nor their attitude.

    A lot of agony could have been avoided if research had been done in the beginning. If more time had been spent looking up what was being sold, and why, instead of slapping marketing speak (much of which has been removed). When selling becomes more important than doing the right thing for the product and the users, you’ve lost something. Make good things, make that important, and not making money and selling them. If that’s all you care about, I’ll make sure to avoid your product.

    By the way… It’s WordPress, with a capital P.