#indieweb 2024-10-04

2024-10-04 UTC
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[fluffy] so all this stuff around Automattic and Wordpress reminds me of the reason Wordpress is even as popular as it is today: because back in the early 00s, Six Apart did some similarly boneheaded threats of license enforcement on Movable Type which led everyone to drop it and switch to Wordpress pretty much overnight.
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aaronpk 😬
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[schmarty] fluffy++
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Loqi fluffy has 2 karma in this channel over the last year (5 in all channels)
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[tantek] Except Six Apart did that to every one of its users. WPEngine is being managed/extracted by private equity so I don't really have a lot of sympathy for their shenanigans. Still the whole fracas does seem reputationally damaging all around
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[tantek] But yeah. Probably a lot of people looking at Ghost right now
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[fluffy] As I recall, Six Apart never threatened individual users of Movable Type, they were just threatening to go after people who were doing “professional services” on Movable Type, which included making themes and custom installations for others.
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[fluffy] They were quite clear on how individual users were free and clear to use it without paying money, but they were becoming more explicit about what they considered to be a commercial use. They were also weirdly proud of having never actually enforced that against Huffington Post, which was at the time the largest/most popular MT-based site.
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[fluffy] Information about this is scattered and fragmented but I found http://www.movableblog.com/archives/2003/06/24/mt_license_debate which at least glances across the issue.
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[fluffy] and that links to https://web.archive.org/web/20040301000634/http://www.mutatedmonkeys.com/weblog/archives/000801.html
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Loqi [indienews] New post: "Mentions United ... 3, 2, 1, Go" https://kiko.io/post/Mentions-United-3-2-1-go/
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[Joe_Crawford] Here’s another Movable Type post — one I linked to back in the day. https://web.archive.org/web/20030702193822/http://tim.movementarian.com/archives/000077.html
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[tantek] Yes that sounds right, only going after that whole (somewhat ambiguous) class of users. There was an attempt at a professional / non-professional distinction (did ad revenue count?), also MT used a custom open source license, not any kind of "standard" one, which they explicitly changed from MT2 to 3 IIRC to include those clauses and that upset people (and broke trust)
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[tantek] Yes, v2 to 3 licensing changes broke trust and scared and angered people. Once lost that trust was not regained even with later revisions that reverted those changes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_Type#History
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Zegnat They have a GitHub repo, but I do not see a license file there. Huh.
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[tantek] maybe that's better for #indieweb-dev Zegnat?
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[tantek] especially if we're talking about contributing or forking code
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[snarfed] I love http://tantek.com's impact on tools so much. browser tab hover pop-up here is 💯, no notes 😆
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[snarfed] https://chat-uploads.indieweb.org/files/2024/10/indieweb-20241004-180855-image.png
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Zegnat I was just trying to figure out what their current license it. I am not planning to touch any code :)
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Zegnat But then I could not find that out, haha
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Loqi [preview] Tantek Çelik
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gRegor haha, that tab hover XD
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[tantek] lol I need to fix that. not a good UX or example thereof
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[Joe_Crawford] I made some layout changes this morning and was looking at longer posts and stumbled on this one from 10 years ago. I surely wish I'd encountered more of IndieWeb stuff then. https://artlung.com/blog/2013/06/08/lots-of-news-few-bloggers/
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Loqi [preview] [Joe Crawford] There could not be more news, and there could scarcely be fewer bloggers
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