Matt explains the WordPress & Windows Azure connection
There’s been some buzz going on in the WordPress community about Matt Mullenweg’s recent appearance at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference, where talk of its cloud computing platform, Windows Azure, powering WordPress.com blogs. Which is surprising, considering the WordPress project is a strong advocate of open source, while the Windows platform is proprietary.
Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg took the stage with Ozzie to talk about why he chose to use Azure for distributed hosting for WordPress and the millions of blogs its customers have online. Automattic is known as a strong advocate of Open Source technology. Mullenweg has built WordPress to run primarily atop Open Source software such as the Linux operating system, the MySQL database and the Apache Web server. Yet there he was onstage with Ozzie plugging Microsoft. Huh?
But Matt clears things up today in this blog post, saying he wants to show how WordPress can run on both open source and proprietary software, and that now includes the Azure platform.
What did you announce about WordPress at Microsoft PDC 09?
As part of the introduction of the Windows Azure platform, we announced that self-hosted WordPress can be run in an Azure environment on an open source stack of Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Showing MySQL in particular at a Microsoft conference was unusual.
He also emphasizes in the post that WordPress.com is not migrating to Azure.
Are you moving WordPress.com to Azure?
No. WordPress.com, which is Automattic’s hosted blogging service, is going to stay on its existing infrastructure. Martin Cron from the Cheezburger Network launched a new blog Oddly Specific on Azure, which some people confused with Automattic.
It’s great that Microsoft and Automattic, proprietary and open source advocates, can work things out like this. And the more ways that WordPress can be run, the better.
VideoPress launches on WordPress.com
VideoPress is a new upgrade feature created by the Automattic team for WordPress.com that lets users create high-definition streaming video for their blogs. It’s also great for video podcasting since it crunches all the necessary work you: videos are iTunes and Miro compatible, and they play in the right frame rates you uploaded them with.
Although there’s no official word yet on when this will be available for self-hosted WordPress sites, you’re advised to create your own WordPress.com account to take advantage of the plugin and then embed the created videos on your WordPress.org blog.
Plus, the VideoPress framework is open source, so we can expect to see more free-flowing improvements to it in the future.
WordPress theme directory updates policy, removes 200 themes
Spectacu.la reports that over 200 themes have been removed from the official WordPress theme repository a couple of days ago, and this is the notification they got:
Links to spectacu.la will no longer be approved, as a result this theme has been suspended.
Looks like Automattic has updated its policy for theme approvals:
Themes for sites that support “premium” (non-GPL or compatible) themes will not be approved.
That means it’s not enough for your theme to be GPL compatible. If you’re simply associated with premium WordPress themes, your free and open source WordPress themes could suffer as well.
More discussion at Justin Tadlock’s site. Is this fair or is this getting to be too harsh?
Revolution premium theme goes open source
Visit Revolution Two, the new site of the free, open source themes.
Revolution, the WordPress theme by Brian Gardner that very well started the premium theme craze, is going open source. An announcement at Gardner’s blog says that by October 31, all of the Revolution themes will no longer be available.
By November 1, a new Revolution site containing GPL licensed themes will be launched. And Jason Schuller will team up with Brian Gardner on the new project.
This is Brian’s explanation for the changes being made to the Revolution theme project:
This one is really simple – more than anything, Jason and I want to develop a resource and community that is perfectly aligned with WordPress. Both he and I have been fortunate enough to leave our day jobs within the past year and have developed our own media companies. None of that would have been possible without the existence of WordPress, which is solely built and supported by the open source community.
It only seems fair that we abandon our current premium theme models, and begin a new way of doing business. I contacted Matt and Toni to see if they would be gracious enough to carve out some time to meet with us, so we could ensure that our business model was in compliance with standards set forth by the authors of the GPL license as well as with WordPress.
This sounds like great news, especially in light of the recent discussion about the ethics of premium themes.
