Concrete The Studio

by Franz

Wow. If you haven’t heard the drama, you should watch this video. In short, a premium theme developer (DYITthemes) which sells a wordpress theme named Thesis does not release it under the GPL license.

Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder and leader of Wordpress is calling him out on it; “when you violate someone’s license it is breaking the law. It’s a definition of breaking the law.”

Chris Pearson says he doesn’t have to release his theme under the GPL “They are not the highest authority node up on the tree that gets to decide everything that happens underneath them.”

You can watch them get all sassy with each other for an hour, if you want. Plenty of people have and some of them are asking for our view on it.

concrete5 is a competitor to Wordpress in ways, and we had to choose a license when we started as well. We specifically did NOT choose the GPL for exactly this reason. Here’s how we see it…

1) Much of this is about distribution. Our understanding of this is pretty simple:

If Thesis is distributed as a stand alone download that /includes/ a copy of Wordpress, then Chris is legally wrong. If you distribute GPL software, everything you add to it has to be GPL compatible. Clear and simple, period.

If Thesis is distributed on its own, I think Chris might have an argument to make. It’s easy to think “hey this does nothing without Wordpress, it is dependent on it, it needs to honor whatever legal requirements Wordpress comes up with” but I don’t think that’s technically true. The GPL is about the copying and distribution of software and it doesn’t really cover this with a tremendous amount of clarity. There’s plenty of examples that would have been a lot more interesting to discuss than what they did in the interview. For example, just because you’ve written software that runs on Linux doesn’t mean it has to be GPL. If you distribute Linux WITH your software as a single solution it does however. How’s that for weird?

Regardless, Chris would have a much better high ground to stand on if Thesis actually worked with different CMS backends – much the way that C# application you wrote for linux could also run on a variety of other operating systems.

2) Matt seems like an awful nice guy, and Pearson comes off like a total douche in this interview. I’ve never met either, I’m sure they’re both awesome, I’m just saying after losing an hour to listening to this crap there’s a pretty clear answer for who I’d like to have a beer with. That’s a tremendous shame because frankly Chris is the underdog here trying to build and maintain a nice small business and Wordpress is the big player trying to squash entrepreneurialism. Regardless, Matt comes off as the hero cause he’s a nice guy and Chris comes off poorly because of the way he makes his arguments. Important lessons there, it’s probably time for us to do a better job stripping drupal references from our customer testimonials.

3) Wow you can tell the difference that some funding makes. Let me just be clear about what I believe to be the real motivators here, please correct me if I’m mis-informed: Wordpress  Automattic has raised over $40m in venture capital. They have over 25 million blogs out there, and fundamentally they are in the content business. They don’t make their real money by selling wordpress, or taking a cut of marketplace add-ons, or offering paid hosting, or any of the stuff we do, they make their money on content. The advertising value on wordpress.com is huge. You have 25 million individuals using your platform to create content, you can monetize that in big ways. That’s why wordpress may be frequently used as a CMS to build some corporate site, but you’ll never see their core team drop features that help my wife (who has an active wordpress blog about DIY sewing), in favor of features that make some corporate extranet easier to run. Matt doesn’t have to worry about making payroll in two weeks, he has to worry about balancing ads and content on Wordpress.com so my wife keeps going there to find other cool sewing blogs she wants to cross link to. Wordpress’s real competitors are Twitter, Facebook, Google – they’re in that big business of re-inventing media. That’s why the GPL makes sense to them. The more wordpress is out there, the better for wordpress, as long as it’s called Wordpress.

Chris on the other hand is selling a Theme that helps turn Wordpress into a application that does something more. Again I’m just guessing here, but it wouldn’t shock me at all to hear Chris’s company is self funded, profitable, and it hasn’t been easy to get there. The idea of having a product that you sell at $50 a pop being distributed for free or even worse sold for $49 somewhere else has to make him physically sick. The carrot of “but people will want you for support” is a pretty grim answer.

I’m not arguing that Matt has an easy life and Chris doesn’t. Certainly the stress of looking Phil Black in the eye and saying “yes your $40m will turn into $800 million, sir” can’t be fun. I’m just saying the two challenges are very different and you can read the distinction in motivation from just the tone of their voices alone.

4) The GPL is stupid, and O’Reilly did us all a tremendous disservice when he came up with “open source”. Yeah I said it, so blah! When I was a developer growing up in the 80’s, we had licenses that actually meant what they said. If you wanted to just give something away, you called it Freeware. If you wanted to save some money on sales but still own your software, you called it Shareware or Crippleware depending on if you offered a fully functional copy with additional features or if you did something like disable save. These labels came from the DIY software world where entrepreneurs could start successful businesses cheap by distributing stuff on BBS’s. (go look up Apogee Games). Meanwhile there were any number of “big” projects that were being distributed under licenses that made sense for schools and huge corporate problems. NASA develops some standard and wants to share it with the world, how do they do that? Several big software vendors see value in a piece of software existing, but not being “owned” by any commercial entity, how do they do that? Everyone wrote their own license and while it was confusing, it worked. Then in the late 90’s the successful technical book publisher O’Reilly came along and dubbed everything I’ve listed as “Open Source” for the benefit of the media which was having a hard time understanding how Linux could compete with Windows. Well that’s cool and all, certainly having concepts that everyone can understand in a word is great, but clearly we aren’t really there. Confusion abounds. People talk about “free beer vs. free speech” all the time, it sounds like a broken record. Any one with half a brain knows that nothing worth having in life is truly free (in cost), yet we also agree that the idea buying a car with the hood welded shut sounds like getting screwed. The goal to provide some clarity across all the different types of licenses that software was released under by calling half “open source” and the other half “commercial” has utterly failed.

5) You say you want freedom? Then the GPL isn’t for you. It is not “freedom” to force people who extend your software to honor ANYTHING you say. I’m not saying it isn’t a good business idea, I imagine it may frequently be a great business idea, but it’s not “freedom” so don’t try to take the moral high ground. You’re limiting people and it doesn’t matter that the perceived motivation of your limit is to enforce further freedom. Freedom doesn’t work that way, but proponents of the GPL seem to think it needs protection. Here’s how we see it:

If you’re for the GPL, you believe freedom is a fragile flower that has to be protected. “This started as free, we’re going to make sure it says free with all our impressive powers.”

If you’re against the GPL, you believe freedom is a force of nature. It may not look that powerful at a glance, but it’s gonna win in the end. It’s like entropy. It exists, it will win. It doesn’t need your help, all it needs is your awareness and faith, and sooner or later it’ll come out on top.

Freedom is the MIT license which to paraphrase in three words says : “Don’t sue us”. If your goal really is to give something away for no cost and have the world be “free” to do whatever it wants with it, that’s all you need. Limit the creators exposure to liability, which would limit their own freedom, and you’ve made it “free.” Of course if you do that you run the risk of someone taking your software packing it up and screwing you over in any number of ways, but no one said freedom was easy.

These issues with the GPL are not new, and it’s sad to see this play out yet again. Frankly I like to think that any legal document’s job is to create clarity, and whatever your view may be, its clear the GPL is pretty gray in spots. In some ways, I hope this does go to court so we can all get a clear answer on how this thing is supposed to work.

Meanwhile if you want to be part of something that is free, and is eager to be free in a simple understandable way, you should be developing stuff for concrete5.

UPDATE : Orrrrr I’m completely wrong.

As more debate continues in IRC and other forums a point has come up that we didn’t address in the original post. Thesis uses wordpress’s theme engine and that includes any number of lines of code that wordpress wrote. Clearly that is their work, covered by their license, and Thesis is a derivative of it. THAT being the case, he very well may be violating the GPL. What gets interesting there is where is the line for that not being derivative? If he just goes through and renames all the functions and variables but it functions the same way, is that new work? What if he changes some logic too, for loops become while loops, etc. Where is the line where something is no longer derivative but a new thing?

What if Thesis makes an abstraction layer from scratch that does nothing but give them some differently named hooks to the same stuff, and then releases THAT abstraction layer LGPL and continues to sell their theme? That sounds legal, annoyingly stupid but legal.

Regardless the fact that everyone’s so confused about this does bring serious questions to the fore on the worth of GPL and what ‘freedom’ means. I hope we find out.

by Franz

We think Six Revisions is an awesome blog with great content, if you don’t read it, you’re missing out.

We’ve been working with them recently to help drive awareness about concrete5, and we’re having them do a fairly sizable giveaway of our stuff now:

“concrete5, an open source content management system created for the end-user (e.g. your non-technical clients) teamed up with Six Revisions to give away a one-year Commercial account (worth $300), free set-up, and $155 in credits on their marketplace for themes and add-ons. Read on to see how you can be the lucky winner of this awesome prize.”

View Post >>

by Franz

See whole article on concrete5.org

by Franz

This was fun!

Got to talk about how and why concrete5 got started, what my own background is, and what makes a startup work. It’s always flattering to be called a “go-getter.”

Here’s the link to the site: http://www.go-getters.ideatewith.com

Also, here’s the iTunes link: http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/go-getters/id337491910

by Franz

Open Source CMS concrete5 Gets Even Sexier to Use, and Catches the Eye of Drupal and Joomla! Developers at SXSW.

Portland, OR (PRWEB) March 29, 2010 — concrete CMS was commercial software that went open source in late 2008, quickly winning project of the month on SourceForge and much attention from a community of open source fans used to dealing with painful user experiences and scattered code. During the last year the core team behind concrete5 has been flushing out features in their CMS, along with building an active community and marketplace at concrete5.org. Now with the release of version 5.4 concrete5 has really hit its stride and the core team expects continued great growth this summer.

concrete5 powers over 35,000 websites today, with a developer community some 18,000 members strong. “We’ve grown very quickly since going open source,” says CTO Andrew Embler. “The core application has always been very stable, but in the past we knew there were a few areas we wanted to clean up. With the sitemap improvements and even faster AJAX editing in 5.4 we’ve really covered the big items on my radar. ”

Some architectural changes to better support the needs of enterprise level clients have already allowed some larger organizations to choose concrete5 over Drupal, Joomla!, and Wordpress. The additional changes to fully embrace the Zend framework by using Zend Cache and Zend Translate has proven well worth the investment.

“It was great fun showing off the release candidate of 5.4 at SXSW:Interactive this year,’ says Franz Maruna, CEO. “We met a lot of Joomla! and Drupal developers who begrudgingly gave us 5 minutes to see the competition, only to walk away 20 minutes later lamenting about time they’d wasted on other systems. I think we showed quite a few people that you can build big powerful sites with concrete5 that really are easy to use.”

See the complete feature list in 5.4 here:
http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/background/version_history/version-5-4-0/

About concrete5
concrete CMS is a leading developer of next- generation open source solutions for web sites. The company’s flagship product, concrete5, combines the ease-of-use of a blogging platform with the flexibility and power of a web development platform. To date, thousands of advertising and creative agencies and web developers around the world have downloaded concrete5 for free and used the technology to quickly and inexpensively build enterprise-quality web sites that can be updated by end users. concrete CMS is a privately held company based in Portland, Oregon, and manages the concrete5.org project. For more information, please visit http://www.concrete5.org.

Contact:
Franz Maruna
503-235-0606
franz (at) concrete5.org

by Franz

Hey Gang,

I’m writing you from lovely Austin TX as we wrap up our exhibit hall stuff at SXSW. It’s been super fun and a LOT of people seem really excited about concrete5. We’ve met plenty of directors of huge companies and consultancies, new media reporters, all sorts of folks, but often its the Joomla developers who have the most amusing response. After starting slow with a “I guess I’ll check it out” and then going through a couple “Holy-Moly its that easy?!?” moments they end up leaving somewhat disgruntled. “Where the h#ll have you guys been? I just wasted 2 years learning Joomla and it took me 10 minutes to get as far as it took me 2 weeks to do in it!”.. That’s good stuff.

Thought we should also let everyone know we FINALLY re-did our documentation and it’s waaaay better now. We still have some pages we want to add, but now everything is nicely organized and makes sense with a cool slidey jump nav. We even hooked it into our forum system using some tags and a “helpful answer” system so instead of those annoying guestbook comments that just grew out of control, our doc pages can start discussions that remain encapsulated but are still searchable.

concrete5.4 is out as a Release Candidate now so you should certainly check that out and let us know if its ready to ship. We think it just about is.

Thanks for your attention,

best

-frz

ps: here’s pics from SXSW.

by Franz

This thing on??    * tap-tap *

Wow, it’s been an embarrassingly long time since anyone looked at this wordpress blog. First, lets pass out blame for that:

• Time – once you have children it stops being endless.
• Twitter – who knows what that thing is gonna become, but it does kinda take a big slice of motivation out of anyone posting to a blog. While crafting the perfect 140 characters isn’t “easy,” it does always seem like the shortest path when you have something new to announce. I’m not arguing that’s right, there’s certainly a lot of crap content with no real voice there – but still. I think every one’s kinda knee jerking over there for news announcements these days.
• Do concrete5 and WP compete? Sure kinda. I guess we say we do on our about page, so *shrugs*. We’ve talked about this here in the past. My view is concrete5 is a flexible CMS (legos), while Wordpress is a really nice Blog (Barbie). Both have value. We never tried to recreate the blog editing experience with concrete5 – but along came some 3rd party developers to do just that. Now there’s kinda an unspoken question of why our blog isn’t in concrete5 and frankly the answer is just Time, again.
• Me. The buck stops here..

So what’s happened since MAY of last year??! Ugh.. well.. a lot!

• Launched the marketplace, had it grow dramatically, fueled by the work of 3rd party developers as much as us.
• Rebuilt the way we do hosting and started developing a true server management application for running multiple concete5 installs on a box.
• Launched a few versions of concrete5 that changed around all sorts of stuff nicely.
• Launched eCommerce add-on, Launched Discussion Forums
• Built a concrete5 cyborg that is laying waste to the American west.

Okay so that last one was a lie, but what’s going on right now?

• We’re just about halfway towards our fund-raising goal for going to SXSW! Thanks to all our donors.
• We were just given a few pages in The New Rules of Marketing & PR by David Meerman Scott. I guess transparency and community are the new big things in marketing, and happily – we’re good at ‘em already!  It’s certainly worth picking this up if you’re trying to bring your company into the 21st century – he does a great job covering everything in detail.

What’s next?

Meh. I’m all tuckered, this is waaay more than 140 characters.. you’ll just have to stay tuned to find out.

by Franz

Okay, we’ve been through this enough times that it deserves a clear position from the CEO….

concrete5 core is free and open source. When we say free, we mean “free beer.” Our belief is that content management is a human right, and we are committed to making it easy for everyone in the world to run a website.

However, not every add-on in our marketplace is free. All of them are open source – meaning once you buy it you are “free” to do what you want to it for that site, and you can get “under the hood” completely. Read the rest of this entry »

by Franz

So my lawyer called me up the other day with interesting news.. “Your trademark application for concrete5(tm) is going well, you’re gonna be able to turn that TM into a little R with a circle any day, just get that c5 crap off of your website.”
Read the rest of this entry »

by Andrew Embler

Thanks to the Usagi Project for putting this video together.

The full HD version can be found here.

by Franz

Some very cool people in Japan have taken the lead with concrete5 there and will be demoing it at on Open Source conference this month. If you happen to be in Japan, or have a lot of disposable income and are looking for an excuse to jump on a plane and head there on short notice…. here ya go!

Usagi Project will attend Tokyo OSC with concrete5 Japanese version.

Tokyo Open Source Conference 2009/Spring
Japan Electronics College Building No.7
1-25-4 Hyakunin-cho
Shinjuky, Tokyo, 169-8522
Japan

東京オープンソースコンファレンス2009/Spring
日本電子専門学校 7号館
東京都新宿区百人町1-25-4

RSVP the seminar at
http://www.ospn.jp/osc2009-spring/modules/eguide/event.php?eid=76

Also you can just show up at our demo booth during the event.
———-
Feb 20 (Fri) 10:00am -5:30pm
Feb 21 (Sat) 10:00am -4:30pm

Date & time for first meeting
Feb 20 (Fri) – 21 (Sat) (Seminar starts on Feb 21 11am)

by Franz

5.2 has been officially released, no more “release candidate.”

We’ve landed two large projects that will improve concrete5 in dramatic ways. First, we’re helping a very excellent creative agency build a big site for a major organization, and it involves a complete overhaul of the file system and asset manager. This is wonderful stuff. This means no more single directory with timestamp prefixes on files, but rather a well thought out system with versions, permissions, meta data – all sorts of nice stuff.

Second, we’re building a major ecommerce implementation for a fun children’s book publisher that integrates concrete5 with Magento Commerce.  Both are very powerful applications for what they do, and should behave well as one product in the future.

We’re also releasing some more add-ons to the marketplace, starting with the ad block today and with the calendar block right around the corner. The forums are going to be heading out to our beta team & user groups shortly – progress is being made on all fronts.

All of this means we’re quite busy, bringing on more help, and generally loving where we are with concrete5! We have to scale back our already limited involvement in the day-to-day postings of the forum. Andrew and I are going to try to get through all un-answered threads once a week if we can, but you’re going to have to continue to rely on the community experts that have already started to answer most stuff in there. If you would like an “official” view on something in a timely fashion, I would strongly encourage you to evaluate the worth of concrete5 to your business and join our Partnership Programs, where we promise your issue attention within 48 hours, typically 8.

So I hope you’re all having a great start of ’09 so far – it’s clearly going to be a very exciting year.

by Franz

When I saw the Title dropdown on the registration form, I should have known things would go poorly. Instead of just your regular old Mr., Mrs., Ms., there were dozens of options.. Esquire.. Captain, Admiral, Sir, Duke – and the oh so too tempting “Lord.” I appreciate the creativity of a bored production programmer, so I couldn’t pass up the opportunity of bringing a touch of royalty to my business trip. Wow, was I mistaken.
Read the rest of this entry »

by Andrew Embler

To anyone in Portland who’s interested: I’ll be doing a demo of concrete5 and a Q&A targeted at developers at pdxphp tonight. It’s at 6:30, at cubespace. 

For more information:

http://pdxphp.org/meetings/2009/january

by Franz

Wow, what a year.

A year ago, we had no idea we were going open source. By summer we were releasing early versions of our re-hauled CMS. By the fall we were getting over a thousand visitors to concrete5.org a day. We were featured as Project of the Month on SourceForge and we’ve been the subject of dozens of positive blogs and interviews. Sites powered with c5 are springing up all across the web, and we couldn’t be happier.

With v5.1 we saw concrete5 go multilingual, and now we have translations for Danish, German and French available (we’d like more!) Folks are using our (previously) secret sauce, and we’re hearing so much positive feedback. With v5.2 (being released as I type) we’ve started adding lots of features for end site owners to love. For a complete internet n00b, it is still far easier to get started with Wordpress than it is c5 – we’re trying to change that.

The concrete5.org website was just got a complete re-hauling. We took it down for 24 hours and turned it back on with a new Marketplace, improved search and Forums, rearranged help… really too much to even mention in this post, read about it over here.

We have a several Add-Ons that will be made available for sale on the Marketplace in the coming weeks, and we’re even more eager for the c5network of developers to submit their own.

2008 has been a crazy adventure, I’m confident 2009 will be even more so – and that’s because of You. Thanks for your continued love and dedication to c5, it’s exciting to get out of bed every day and see what’s happened. Let’s take over the web!

-frz