I’ve decided to let the live site run the theme even though it’s not really 100% ready. it’s a little work-in-progress but it’s nearly there. A few things need sorting out and a few of the pages are a bit icky, if you can find them that is. The site navigation is another thing to sort out.

I’ve called the theme Fitzy and it’s a child theme of Thematic. Once I get it working fully to my liking I may make it a download on here if anyone wants it.

We’ll see.

This post is a reaction to, or perhaps it’s better described as my thoughts on, the situation that exists regarding WordPress and its licence, the GNU General Public License (GPL).

I’m also going to be quoting and answering points raised on Liz Jamieson’s website over at Big Satchurday. Liz wrote a blog-post titled Thesis, The GPL and WordPress – What Does It All Mean? which was prompted by a discussion over at Mixergy between Mat Mullenweg and Chris Pearson. Mat is a lead developer at WordPress and is its public face. Chris is the developer of Thesis, a theme for WordPress.

I was going to reply to Liz on her site but realised that it would be a lengthy entry, so I decided to expand my reply into an entry on my site, right here.

What are WordPress and The GPL?

It’s probable, if you’re a seasoned internet user, that you’ve heard of WordPress. If you haven’t, it’s web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. It’s what’s in use right here on this website.

You may not have heard of the GPL, or, perhaps you have heard of it but didn’t read it because it looks like some boring terms and conditions that come with stuff you’ve bought or downloaded. The GPL is:

…a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works.

The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its users. We, the Free Software Foundation, use the GNU General Public License for most of our software; it applies also to any other work released this way by its authors. You can apply it to your programs, too.

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things.

To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights. Therefore, you have certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of others.

For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.

An important part of the above quote is the one referring to free software meaning freedom and not price. This is from WikiPedia:

With the advent of the free software movement, license schemes were created to give developers more freedom in terms of code sharing, commonly called open source or FOSS. As the English adjective “free” does not distinguish between “for zero price” and “liberty”, the phrases “free as in beer” (gratis, freeware) and “free as in speech” (libre, open source) were adopted.

These phrases have become common, along with gratis and libre, in the software development and computer law fields for encapsulating this distinction.

There’s a good video from The Free Software Foundation that explains the GPL and Free Software:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=te1Vbt-BGMA

Then of course, there’s Stephen Fry’s video wishing GNU a Happy 25th birthday:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT7Vl4UpCEM

So what we have in the GPL and Free Software is an ideology that promotes sharing, social interaction and advancement in an open and free way. You are entitled to use, modify and build upon the work of others and the only thing asked of you is that anything you produce that derives from the free software, adopts the same licence. You are given freedom, you should pass-on freedom.

So where’s the problem, how can anyone not like this concept?

The GPL and Business

Chris Pearson, the aforementioned Thesis author, is an apparently successful WordPress developer. His Thesis theme is popular and sells. You buy Thesis and you get a slick addition to WordPress together with support in the form of tutorials and a web based community. The problem is, Pearson doesn’t release Thesis under the GPL in direct violation of the GPL itself. He builds upon WordPress therefore Thesis automatically must adopt the GPL. Pearson is entitled to sell you his theme BUT IT MUST be GPL. He could divide his theme into two parts, one that contains code derived from or built upon WordPress and then one part that contains files that don’t, such as CSS files or Javascript. He doesn’t, in fact, he adds his own terms of service:

Use or distribution of Thesis in violation of the terms and conditions of membership contained in this document will result in termination of your membership, without refund. Also, please be civil and considerate when making use of the support forums, as bad behavior is also grounds for termination of your membership.

So Pearson is freely taking the work of others whose expressed wish is that he can have it, use it and build on it PROVIDED his derivative work adopts the same licence.

How wonderful and how altruistic of the large numbers of WordPress developers to do such a thing. What does Pearson do? He decides to ignore them and apply his own licensing terms with a view to making money. I personally find that disgusting.

Pearson can bleat all he wants about how he wants a payout for all his time and effort but he misses the point that’s sat there right in front of him. He can make money from the GPL through his support and website but he simply cannot break the GPL licence for his own gain. The GPL is there to protect people’s freedoms and he’s trampling all over them. Pearson will argue that the GPL doesn’t apply to Thesis because it’s a separate entity from WordPress. Well how can it be? As Mat Mullenweg says, WordPress without Thesis (using its default 2010 GPL theme), you have something to look at. Thesis without WordPress, nothing. So there’s no argument, Thesis absolutely relies on WordPress and is therefore derived from it and inherits the GPL.

But what does Mat Mullenweg do in response in the interview at Mixergy and Pearson’s blindness over the issue? He asks Pearson to join the WordPress family. He says, in a tongue-in-cheek way that he’ll use Thesis if it becomes GPL. He asks Pearson to take a leap of faith and dismantle the restrictive walls surrounding his work and embrace the open community. I don’t think he will and he should be ashamed.

I already respected Mat Mullenweg prior to listening to the Mixergy interview but I now admire him immeasurably. He has this wonderful software that millions of people use and he has the vision to allow it to be GPL. How can anyone criticise Mat for his adoption and use of the GPL. He and others are giving you their work, free of charge. Let’s put that in bold in case you didn’t see it, FREE OF CHARGE

Me

I suppose this is a good place for me to talk about how I came to be such a staunch supporter of the GPL and Free Software.

When I started regularly using computers, my chosen platform of choice was Amiga. It was by accident because some software that I wanted to use was based on that platform and so that’s the direction I took. The Amiga OS was/is a proprietary system, meaning that it has a closed restrictive licence. Nevertheless, in those days I was blissfully unaware of the GPL and since the Amiga was a platform running in direct competition to the future behemoth of the Microsoft hegemony, it suited me. I even became one of the founders of an Amiga User group and I wrote some small pieces of software for the platform.

When the future of Amiga began to look uncertain I clung onto the hope that it would somehow undergo a renewal and be developed into a realistic and viable alternative to Windows. It didn’t happen. It was around this time that I decided to look at Linux. I grabbed a copy off a magazine cover disk and installed the software to my PC. It was a crazy new world and I was a little bit bedazzled. Fortunately, I’m quite at home on the command line and so changing over to the Linux shell was an easy transition for me.

One of the first things I wanted to install was a FTP server so that I could transfer files between machines. I’d used a some proprietary licensed FTP software on my Amiga so I began searching for a Linux one. It was a little confusing and my search results didn’t help. Then I wondered if perhaps, somehow, there was already a client in my newly installed Linux box. I opened a terminal and typed “ftp localhost”. I was instantly logged into my own machine because it was already running a FTP server out of the box. I really was gobsmacked. The software that I was looking to pay for was already there, and it was free. It was GPL.

Now this is going to sound a bit silly, but from that moment on my outlook on life has changed. The fact that people are prepared to effectively give away their work for the benefit of the community at large did and still does blow my mind. I’d love to be able to release my own software in a similar way but I’m not a programmer. So what I do is help out in other ways. I encourage people to use Free software, I answer question from Free software users and I go out of my way to help them.

This way of thinking, this ideology has stirred something in me that I didn’t know was there. The very core of who I am these days is centred around community, helping people and sharing. It’s called socialism. It’s the reason I feel very passionate about protecting freedom. It’s the reason I hate the big guys hitting on the little guys. It’s the reason I despise the bankers bonus culture. It’s the reason I’ve decided to join a political party with it’s roots in socialism. It’s the reason I pound the streets of Leeds shoving leaflets into people’s letterboxes, without being paid to do it. It’s the reason I will stop and help someone when others will drive past. It’s the reason why I’ll let others go first. It’s the reason I consider myself to be a better person than I was in my youth.

It’s not about me, me me. It’s about us.

There’s a Bantu word: Ubuntu. You may know it as a Linux Distribution . That distribution is so called because of the meaning of Ubuntu. Nelson Mandela explained Ubuntu as follows:

A traveler through a country would stop at a village and he didn’t have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu but it will have various aspects. Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question therefore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve?

That’s why I love and fiercely defend the GPL, Free Software, GNU and Linux. It’s because I am what I am because of who we all are.

Richard Stallman

It’s worth pointing out that the GPL exists because of Richard Stallman (RMS). The hacker (and that’s not a bad thing) culture in which he existed promoted sharing and openness. When he was denied access to source code to try and fix something, the result was the start of his crusade for Free Software.

Liz Jamieson

I’m not singling out Liz here, I’m actually just answering her blog-post within my blog-post. I quite like Liz and although I’ve never conversed with him her husband Russell seems like an OK guy.

Firstly Liz asks:

We built a free GPL compliant WordPress plugin and because we have a high adherence to quality and service, it takes a lot of effort in support and development time. I don’t mind that but I do want to make a paid version of it that protects my time investment in the overall offering. Given that I willingly give the free plugin away for free along with support for said plugin, how can I get paid for the extra effort I place into the paid features? How do I do that? It’s not obvious to me at all – I see Chris’s point of view. I’m not trying to be awkward here – I really want to know the answer. Maybe someone who can pay their mortgage based on their work (non client based please) with wholly compliant GPL plugins and themes could help me out here.

I understand your point, I really do. The thing is though, your plugin (which I like btw!) inherits the GPL. So you can charge for it but you must make the source available for it. If you’re not happy with that, then you should concentrate on writing plugins for non-GPL software. It’s cold and harsh, but it really is as simple as that.

A point that I often repeat is that you have chosen the leader in the blogging world: WordPress, because it’s exactly that. It has the largest userbase. So it’s a bigger market for you. WordPress however, is given away free of charge because it comes without restriction. Yet you want to restrict the use of a plugin for it? That’s selfish isn’t it? You’re happy to accept the WordPress licence allowing you to do what you want with the software, but you want to then disregard it for your own profit? You know that can’t be right.

If this means that it effects you as a small business, because no-one is going to pay for support, well again, it’s harsh but it’s a bullet you have to bite. The bullet was fired your way when you started developing for WordPress. Software built on sharing and co-operation.

I think that writing something that merely sits on top of something else doesn’t make it derivative. Thesis for me is not a derivative work in common sense terms, only in GPL terms.

Now I really don’t understand this. Thesis without WordPress is nothing. WordPress without Thesis is a blogging platform. The GPL is there to protect the rights of the authors of WordPress. If Pearson profits because of Thesis, that profit is DIRECTLY linked to Thesis running on WordPress. Of course, that profit is fine if someone wants to pay, but the price Pearson MUST pay is to release Thesis as GPL. Now that’s a sensible business model isn’t it. What’s the alternative, enforce a restrictive licence on WordPress thereby requiring all its users to pay a fee for its use? The blogging world would collapse overnight!

If I go my local supermarket (Waitrose, let’s say it’s a GPL supermarket) and buy a GPL cake, then take it home, cover it in icing and stick a couple of icing sugar roses on it then enter it into a cake competition, which I then win, people might say I cheated (analogy for breaking rules of the GPL). But under the GPL, if I go to Waitrose and buy other GPL products such as flour, eggs, sugar, and some other stuff, take them home, make a cake and enter the result into a cake competition and win it, then that’s also not OK. Because it’s still a derivative cake.

GPL supporters will say that’s right – so base your cake on non-GPL supermarket products if that’s how you feel. But I like shopping at Waitrose.

Your analogy is flawed here Liz. In the first case, your purchased GPL cake is forked by you when you ice it and decorate it. If you then win a cake competition, good for you! Everyone can see what you did. Are you really going to try and pass it off as completely your own? The cake world would out you and you’d just look silly.

In your second case I don’t even see a problem? You use GPL products to make another product which then wins you a competition, what’s wrong with that?

I think the problem is that cakes and ingredients are tangible things. Software isn’t. What you look at are just pixels on a screen. It doesn’t exist in the real world. What does exist is service. A service to support those ethereal pixels and bytes is tangible and therefore chargeable.

So this is what we all have to do? Create free and pro versions of plugins that we can offer to those who want to learn from and re-use the code, but keep the tricky bits on remote servers so that we can be paid and so provide quality updates and support to our users.

Provided the tricky bits don’t inherit the GPL, that’s fine. It’s not my cup of tea since I believe that all software should be free but in this instance we’re talking about the GPL.

Grokking Free Software and the GPL

In my opinion, developers who want to release software derived from or forked from GPL licensed work don’t actually grok the whole free software ethos. They see large userbases such as the one surrounding WordPress and simply want to cash-in. It’s understandable. However, they fail to realise the reason why the GPL exists and choose to ignore it for their own reward.

I don’t have a solution, other than to recommend a paid-support based service. Keep your software free and open, bill for your service man-hours. If it doesn’t suit your needs, you need to develop for another platform.

get_iplayer

Firstly, the videos I needed to shorten were from the BBC.. There’s a command line tool called get_iplayer that enables me to grab live or recorded video from the BBC site. It’s way too complex to fully describe here but the command I used to grab my video clip was:

get_iplayer http://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/house_of_commons/default.stm --stop 1800 --get

That command retrieves the embedded live video on that particular BBC web page and saves the file as an *.avi. The --stop 1800 argument recorded 1800 seconds of video (60secs x 30mins = half an hour – I was having my tea!). Once I’d retrieved the video I had to find the start-time of my desired clip and then calculate its duration. I used ffmpeg to create a *.flv file from the original *.avi.

I found that the original downloaded file’s audio and video were out of sync, by approximately 1 second. More Googling and I found a way to encode the *.flv file and offset the audio/video. Here’s the command I used:

 ffmpeg -i downloaded.avi -vcodec copy -itsoffset 1 -i downloaded.avi -map 1:0 -map 0:1 -ss 848 -t 399 result.flv

That took the video from the downloaded file, offset by 1 second from the audio in the same file, starting at 848 seconds and lasting 399 seconds. Cool.

Copy of a Copy

Much in the way a photo-copied document starts to degrade after multiple recopying, the same goes for video. Downloading a video, shortening it and then uploading the result to YouTube produced acceptable but not very clear looking videos. I had to reduce the number of copies so the answer was to locally host the file. Well, hosting the file on Amazon S3 and making use of their content delivery network (CDN).

Google led me to the marvellous site by Mark Pilgrim, Dive into HTML 5. The video section of the site goes into great detail about how best to display video in modern browsers and a link through to another awesome page, Video for Everybody. That site outlines how to display video in older or incapable browsers; yes Internet Explorer, pay attention. The information described in those two sites is invaluable, however since I primarily use WordPress for blogs and sites, I decided to use a plugin to display either *.flv or *.m4v files.

Not as pure as Video for Everybody but nevertheless, everyone should be able to see the video.

Flowplayer

Flowplayer is a tool that allows you to display video on your site in a YouTube style enclosure, complete with controls. There are a number of WordPress Plugins that utilise Flowplayer but some of them collide with jQuery. One that doesn’t is FV WordPress Flowplayer, so that’s what I’m using here on my site.

The plugin uses short codes to embed your video files, like this:

[flowplayer src=source.flv width=600 height=350 splash=video_splashimage.jpg]

It seems to work pretty well. You can see an embedded video here: Embedded video using flowplayer. If I wasn’t using WordPress or something similar I’d definitely use the Video for Everyone technique for video embedding.

I’ve put this entry on my blog so that I don’t forget how to do it next time. It’s fairly straightforward to do so if you ended up here from a search engine, I hope you find it useful.

Caramboo Videos

Nice!

However, sometime at the start of the year, Apache would sometimes throw a wobbler during the night here in the UK. Perhaps one day in 14 I’d get up and find my VPS slowed to a crawl; the culprit would be Apache hogging the CPU. Ouch! Restarting the Apache process would calm things down and I didn’t need to reboot but obviously something was awry.

At first I thought that the problem was an Apache misconfiguration. I focused my attention on a few segments of the main Apache configuration file and fiddled with these as follows:

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<ifmodule mpm_prefork_module>
    StartServers          3
    MinSpareServers       3
    MaxSpareServers       7
    MaxClients           20
    MaxRequestsPerChild  1000
</ifmodule>
<ifmodule mpm_worker_module>
    StartServers          2
    MaxClients          150
    MinSpareThreads      25
    MaxSpareThreads      75 
    ThreadsPerChild      25
    MaxRequestsPerChild   0
</ifmodule>

This didn’t do the trick (although the configuration is sound). I decided to trawl through my log-files and found that since most of my visitors are UK based, the sites were generally quiet during the UK night. However, around 6.00am, I’d get hit with a plethora of robots from all over the place wanting to spider my site. So that’s a good thing yeah? Well not in my case. It was around this time that my VPS would go wonky.

I wondered about the WordPress pseudo-cron facility. WordPress can perform tasks on your site(s) at pre-determined times but in the absence of a real cron, the task is triggered on the next page load after the scheduled time has passed.

I run several time dependent plug-ins on my sites such as Lifestreams, RSS feeds and Caches, so if these weren’t going to run until a page load, and there were next to no page loads in the night, then when the robots came-a-calling, all the cron jobs across several sites would trigger at the same time. So I thought about a solution and came up with:

• Disabling the WordPress pseudo-cron
• Enabling a remote cron where I could control the time schedule

Disabling the Pseudo-Cron

This is easy. All you need to do is add this code-snippet into your wp-config.php file:

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define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true);

Once added, that’s it. WordPress doesn’t run its cron on page loads. OK, so now we need to run a real cron. I run mine from a remote server like so:

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0,30 * * * * /usr/bin/wget -O /dev/null http://foobar.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron >/dev/null 2>&1

The above crontab entry runs the WordPress cron every 30 minutes, on the hour and on the half-hour. That’s easy for me since I have a remote shell account. If you don’t or the world of crontabs is a little bit mysterious to you, you can get a free web based cron account here:

http://www.mywebcron.com/

Once you’ve set-up your freebie account you can configure your cron call thus:

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http://foobar.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron

Nice and Stable

Good news. Since employing the above strategy, Apache is behaving itself and my sites achieved a 100% uptime during February. There is one little caveat to this news though. At the same time as making these changes to my system, I also installed Monit:

Monit is a free open source utility for managing and monitoring, processes, files, directories and filesystems on a UNIX system. Monit conducts automatic maintenance and repair and can execute meaningful causal actions in error situations.

What all that means is that if Apache does misbehave, Monit will gracefully restart the process and notify me. Since I installed it, Monit hasn’t had to do anything because my system has been OK but it’s a useful addition to my uptime bragging ability! I’ll write about Monit in another post.

Anyway, I’ll do a new theme (most likely child-theme) by the end of the month.

Well. I’ve decided to stop using it and here’s why.

Too Many Blogs!

I keep realising (and then forgetting and then re-realising) that if I set-up too many personal sites or blogs, I spread myself out way too thinly. I’m not the most prolific of bloggers at the best of times and if I’ve got to race round updating multiple sites, I’m just not going to and indeed didn’t bother. My Sweetcron site somehow became my lazy-blog. I knew I could fire off a few tweets here and there and the blog gods would be happy because I was doing my bit. So then this site site right here becomes like a ghost town. I even started giving out my Sweetcron address as the URL of my web-site. I’m such a cheat.

What’s sort of swung it for me are a couple of reasons. The first is that the Sweetcron Author himself has stopped using his own software and cites the impersonality of lifestreaming as one of the reasons. He’s actually moved onto Posterous as his blogging platform and makes regular updates. The second reason is that there’s a now a Lifestream Plugin for WordPress. I’ve installed it and without doing any customisation it already looks pretty neat. You can see it on this page. I’ll probably try and get my own style going there when I can get round to it but like I say, it looks pretty much OK as it is.

So What Now?

So, now that the Sweetcron site has bit the dust I’ll have to write in here more. I’m still going to have more than one site running but this place here will be for personal stuff. A proper blog with the attraction of an added Lifestream. I’m going to build a second site for geeky/linuxy/webby stuff and that will be more the start of business enterprise. We’ll see what happens. I’m going to need to find another income stream anyway since The Form Analyst has now closed its doors and is becoming a free site. Which kinda sucks!

Onwards and upwards…

I found myself with the option of working out what had gone wrong (the server wouldn’t even boot properly) which I may have managed, or to bite the bullet and start again with a fresh install. I went for the latter because I really couldn’t be bothered with the former and it would enable me to build a few applications in a way I wished I’d done on the first install. Fortunately due to WP-DB-Backup and rdiff-backup I was able to rebuild and restore quite quickly. DefCon 1 at 8.30am, multi-user subscription website and server back up and running at 2.00pm. I even managed to get a temporary forum up and running so that the users had somewhere to hang out. That was on-line at 9.00am.

The new set-up has Nginx proxying to Apache. I’d wanted to do it for ages and so now Nginx serves up the static content, Apache looks after all the PHP and other swanky malarky. I also did a review of the plugins on the site and found that one was really slowing things down to a crawl. It was Social Access Control that seemed to be strangling the server. I swapped it out for Justin Tadlock’s Members plugin. Things are a lot swifter. Maybe I didn’t have Social Access set-up correctly, who knows, it’s toast now. Members takes a little bit more messing about with templates to get it running sweet, but I like the concept and it’s there to stay over at TFA.

I was thinking of writing a few posts on the way I’ve got Nginx and Apache working in tandem but all I did was Google their names with the word proxy thrown in for good measure and all the help you need is already out there.

Google is your friend.

• Somewhere to test stuff
• An Apache Web Server (I use Nginx on my own server)
• As many domains/sub-domains as I like
• 5OGB of backup space
• Lots of funky stuff, like subversion!

All for less than that ten dollars. Cool or what!

If you don’t know what subversion is:

Subversion (SVN) is a version control system initiated in 1999 by CollabNet Inc. It is used to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly-compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS).

So my plan is use the following workflow:

• Create/Edit files on my Desktop machine
• Save/Open them on my local server via SSH
• Sync my local server files with my repository at Dreamhost
• Sync the live site on my remote server with my repository

I already backup any sites I have or am working on via rsync or rdiff-backup to my Dreamhost backup account. This new subversion set-up will be used for current development synchronisation with the bonus of historical svn backups.

It all sounds lovely and geeky to me which is great. Trust me it’s good.