jeff eaton

25

Totally apropos of nothing, today's Something Positive delivers on a twist I've been totally rooting for for what feels like eons. Knowing the way the story goes, it'll probably end in tears and depraved midgets and propane explosions, but for now I can whoop and shout.

So everyone's buzzing about the official announcement that Movable Type 4.0 is now available under the GPL license. For those who haven't been paying attention for the last couple of years, MT was the killer app for bloggers who wanted more control over their site and didn't have the time or the inclination to roll their own.

The release of Movable Type 3 alienated a lot of users by (gasp!) charging for multi-author blogs and installations with more than 3 installed blogs. It wasn't a big deal for most people, but it priced a lot of midrange hobbyists out of the MT world and set up the pins for Wordpress's ultimate domination of the universe. Movable Type remains a very strong multi-blog management system, and it has a great ecosystem of extensions. There's also a large pool of designers familiar with its purely tag-based templating language. The licensing hiccups with version 3, though, left a lot of individual users wondering if future penny-pinching would result in a squeeze for more licensing fees from smaller blogs.

The official release of MT4 under the GPL eliminates that fear, and opens up potential for adaptation and enhancement that's previously been off-limits. While MT's source code has always been available and hackable for its customers and users, it was "free as in beer," not "free as in speech." In other words, the modifications I made to enhance it couldn't be distributed to other users as "Enhanced Movable Type," nor could I distribute a copy of MT pre-configured with popular extensions.

While this isn't a big deal for many users, it's a big deal for interoperability with other GPL projects like Joomla! and Drupal. Those projects can now legally build bridges to the MT sourcecoude, integrating MT blogs into larger solutions like portal sites and intranets. It will also make the next version of Gutenberg, my Movable Type compatibility theme for Drupal, quite a bit easier to maintain. Why? I'll be able to legally include some of the MovableType base stylesheets in the Gutenberg download, making that theme usable from the moment it's installed, rather than pointing users to a separate download. It's a small step, but an important one, towards making multiple blogging systems compatible with each other for designers.

This principle goes both ways -- it's now possible for SixApart to make use of a large pool of GPL code that's in use in the wild. While I'm sure that wasn't their motivation, it's a nice door to have open. For companies like SixApart, where hosted services and corporate support contracts are the primary revenue stream, this approach is win-win. While it may not bring the legions of WordPress users back to the fold, it's a great moment for SixApart and Open Source software.

Saturday, Catherine and I hopped over to Big Rock for a crafting class at a local wool and textiles shop. I learned how to make felt. How awesome is that?

A little over a year ago, I posted a frustrated plea to social and religious conservatives: work with me, I'm trying to help you. For years I've insisted that snarky inversion -- "That guy's so adamant that homosexuality is wrong, he must be closeted!" -- is just wrong-headed and lazy. I'm a big believer in good-faith arguments and logical thinking when it comes to important issues, you know? A few years ago, social conservatives started making that really difficult.

It seems like we're watching gay sex scandals unfold with conservatives on a biweekly basis at this point; Gay hookers and meth? Check. Trying to pick up guys in a public bathroom? Check. Offering sex to black men because they're big and scary and black? Check. Getting your subordinates drunk and trying to give them blowjobs while they're passed out? Sweet Jesus, check. The list just keeps going, and last week another one hit the wires.

[Berkeley CA], after providing free berthing for a Sea Scouts boat for 60 years, said in 1998 that a Boy Scout policy barring gay scouts and atheists violated Berkeley’s rules against discrimination. The city said the Scouts would have to leave the berth or pay $500 a month rent.

Eugene A. Evans, 64, a retired high school teacher and for 35 years leader of the Berkeley Sea Scouts, sued for discrimination and for violating the Scouts’ First Amendment rights. The California Supreme Court ruled in favor of Berkeley.

[This week], Mr. Evans was arrested at his home in nearby Kensington on Tuesday after investigators identified four youths, ages 13 to 17, who said they had been sexually abused by him.

Congratulations, social conservatives. You've made a logical fallacy true. In the face of overwhelming evidence, I withdraw the position that I've held for years and admit the truth. The easiest way to spot a closeted gay S&M furry pedophile is to ask, "Did they vote against Gay rights, or do they regularly talk about homosexuality being a sin?" If the answer is yes, hide your pets: God only knows what they do when you're not looking.

I've been on the road for the last 10 days or so with the rest of the 'Bots, first for a training workshop in Providence and then for some on-site training with a client in NYC. It's the longest Catherine and I have been apart since we married, and it's been be back together after so long. It's startling how much those kinds of rhythms can become part of how you measure your days, and how off-kilter it can feel when they're disrupted.

The work itself was great, though -- the workshop was the largest we've ever done, with almost fifty people and a new venue to fit them all. Feedback has been great so far; there were a lot of great people there working on interesting projects. It's encouraging to see all of us (the Lullabot team, that is) polishing the flow and professionalism of the material. With each workshop, things are more refined, better focused, and so on. James did an awesome job organizing the week.

Spent the weekend in New York with James and Liza doing a bit of recuperating before diving into another two days of training with in-house developers for Mansueto. Their IncBizNet project soft-launched in beta a little over a month ago, and they're in the final stretch with the new Fast Company site. It's the culmination of over a year and a half of business development, planning, and then Drupal development.

And today? Back in the saddle with code reviews for Mansueto, outlining on the O'Reilly book, and other assorted projects. And this morning, my name popped up on the list of confirmed speakers for the 2008 SXSW Interactive conference. I'll be participating in a panel discussion about open source web software organized by the head of Palantir, a cool Chicagoland design/development company that's been doing great stuff with Drupal lately.

Whew.

Never a dull moment!

If you've spent any time in the Drupal community, you've run into the unstoppable Angela Byron -- a.k.a., Webchick. She's one of the pillars of the Drupal community: she writes documentation, helps train new users, organizes important projects, tests patches, writes modules, writes patches for Drupal Core, is a member of the Drupal Association board, and is basically everywhere at once and friendly while doing it.

Last night, while she helped organize a dinner for Drupal's founder Dries Buytaert, Webchick's car was broken into and her MacBook Pro was stolen. Like most of us geeks, Webchick's laptop is the hub of an entire digital life, and replacing it is no picnic. The good news, though, is that it gives us all a chance to do something cool for Webchick -- I've set up a Chipin.com fundraiser to replace Angie's laptop. Let's see if the Drupal community can take care of this little problem and get a brand new computer in her hands, eh? Eh! If you want to toss a few coppers in the can for Webchick, click here!

UPDATE! Hooooray! We raised just over $1500 for Angie, enough to pay for what her insurance company didn't cover, and some spiffy add-ons to make her computing experience even spiffier. She's now getting back into the swing of things and should be around soon! Thanks to everyone who donated and expressed their support. The Drupal community rocks.

Greg Knaddison is working on a list of statistics to track the health of the Drupal community. One of the stats mentioned was "Number of Ponies Eaton Owes Dries for Core Commits."

For the record, I am currently four ponies in the hole. Three of these ponies were accumulated during the early FormAPI 3 development and testing process. The fourth was lost to Dries during a secret high-stakes game of poker that resulted in the repositioning of the Primary Links menu in Drupal 6's standard page.tpl.php file.

This blog post will be updated in the future as more pony-debt is accumulated.

So I couldn't sleep last night. What did I do? I went to Free CSS Templates and downloaded a CC 2.5 CSS skin. And I made a new Drupal 6 theme. This is easy enough that it could turn into a habit...