PhotoDude.com

Mon. May 24, 2004

Movable Text Type Pattern

There’s some news regarding Textpattern that I’ll get to below, but let’s take care of overdue business first. It’s been a week now, but after the recent uproar over the new licensing, Mena asked us to tell them “how you’re using Movable Type and TrackBack this entry.”

Let me start off with how I’d like to use MT; in a way that no longer looks like a licensed option. For various reasons, I’d planned on converting PixelPile.org over to MT. It’s a community photolog, totally non-profit, but we have 25 authors, and one of the motives for switching to MT had been the ability to add even more.

As best I can tell from the price structure, we’d have to start with the $190 top level Personal license which allows 13 authors, and then buy the “Personal Edition Add-On license,” which “will allow you to add 1 weblog and 1 author to your Personal Edition license for $9.95.” Or rather, buy twelve of them, to allow a total of 25 authors. $190 + $120 = $310. And then each new author would have to pony up $10 from then on.

For a non-profit community funded out of my wallet that only spends $250 a year on hosting and domain fees, well, that’s not likely to happen. But what if we did? Phil Ringnalda took a detailed look at the license (in which Anil commented that some of the “problem areas” are likely to be revised), and as it’s currently worded, it does leave you open to “losing your investment”: “So far as I know, 6A is still currently not-Evil. However, you could buy a $149 personal license today, add a few hundred dollars worth of extra authors next week, and when they sell out the week after that, be ordered to delete your copy of MT.”

So, as for the situation with a site like PixelPile.org, I don’t know what the solution might be, or if there is one. I think that type of group blog just got priced out of using MT.

After the initial licensing hub-bub, part of Six Apart’s response was to … clarify … their definition of a “weblog.”

“Weblog” means a single Web site viewable at a single URL (Uniform Resource Locator), consisting of one or more weblogs as generated by the Software via the “Create New Weblog” function of the Software.

As Phil notes, “The out-of-band (and thus, by the terms of the Agreement, not a part of the Agreement) explanation has been that things like linklogs and photologs don’t count as separate weblogs, but that just stitching together a single aggregated view of multiple separate weblogs isn’t enough to make them only count as one.”

Which, I think, leaves me in a grey area. First of all, Arbitrary Secondaries, QuoteLog, and PixelPile all appear together as a part of the home page, fitting the above definition, but each of them also has its own “freestanding” directory archive page (linked in this sentence). That wouldn’t be quite so grey if I was using MT to create my main weblog, which pulls all the “sub-blogs” together.

But I’m not. I’m using Textpattern for my main weblog. Which is most definitely not “generated by the Software via the ‘Create New Weblog’ function of the Software.” However, it’s a bit of a moot point. Even though I think I would fit the “one author and three weblogs” restriction for a free license, I don’t anticipate upgrading from version 2.6 to version 3.0. I wouldn’t really gain anything from improved comment moderation, as only PixelPile has them … a whopping 23 comments since last September, and 2 spams. Nor do I see any real benefit to switching them over to Textpattern; they are fine as they are.

So that’s how I now use MT; in a much more minimal manner than I once did, so much so that it would take significant feature upgrades to give me any reason to upgrade and acquire a license.

Now, on to Textpattern. First of all, Dean has announced that “As of version g1.19, Textpattern is free, open-source software. It is also available under a commercial license which permits proprietary usage, free of any obligation to release changes to the source code under an open-source license. This dual-licensing model (similar to those used by MySQL, Trolltech, and others ) is intended to keep options open for everybody who wishes to use Textpattern, from an individual weblog publisher to a multinational corporation.”

But wait, there’s more! Dean has bigger plans for Textpattern than to be just another package you can download. Much bigger. So much so, he apparently was on the verge of making a large deal with some Venture Capitalists. And, well, his new cohort Jason Hoffman picks up from there:

So all said and done, it was a sweet deal, about as good as they get. Dean would have been able to pay cash for most of his house, a solid salary, the beginnings of a staff, an office in California, and the beginnings of his own NOC.

Amazingly, he ended up turning it all down and asked me to put together a different plan. One that would more closely involve the gamma users and allow Textpattern to go open-source and still provide some people to use Textpattern in commercial settings/applications. We came up with a dual-license approach that allow users to choose, and are focusing on providing services (like Textdrive) to members of the community.

Textdrive is Dean’s soon to be launched web hosting service. And what was that “different plan” to finance it?

The best scenario I can imagine is one that sees TextDrive break even (be profitable, actually) on day 1 of operation, funded only by customers. This is achievable by way of a very sweet ‘Members Circle’ offer, one which gives Textpattern users an opportunity to acquire a piece of TextDrive at its inception, and to benefit from its future success in perpetuity:

Buy a year of TextDrive now [$199], and, hosting-wise, you’re set for life.

So 200 (or slightly more) of the over 1,100 people in the Textpattern support forum will, in effect, become the VC’s for Textdrive. And for the upfront cost of about 8 months of web hosting, they will be, as Dean says, “set for life.”

The following are excerpts from what is now an eight page thread, summarizing some of the web hosting details:

TextDrive, Inc. is/will be a California corporation and focused on hosting services for the Textpattern community.

At the outset this service was designed to be the best possible host for Textpattern (indeed for all PHP/MySQL software), but has blossomed into something more: a webhost that offers the best in performance, security and stability, backed by intelligent configuration and great software.

It kicks all kinds of ass.

1 GB storage, 10 GB’s monthly bandwidth, up to 10 domains pointing to directories in your server space, and unlimited subdomains, Up to 20 MySQL databases.

The 1GB/10 GB plan will be available for about $25/month, and a lesser 100MB/1GB account at $5/month.

Textpattern preinstalled and kept current (as a working copy from Textpattern-stable’s Subversion repository) ... You can run WordPress if you like (if you do, we’ll donate 10% to the WP development fund)

Servers co-located with INetU and thePlanet on 100Mbps connections

FreeBSD optimized at the kernel level for Apache, PHP and MySQL, with up to 98% web bandwidth compression.

Intrusion detection system and file-integrity checking, Prevention of XSS, MySQL-injection and other attacks, Blocking of spambots, harvesters and robots.

Accelerator, optimizer, and dynamic content cache for PHP, MySQL query caching, MySQL 4.0.latest on dedicated database servers, phpMyAdmin, plus WebDAV, SFTP.

E-mail: Postfix SMTP with SSL, secure authorisation and furious spam/content/attachment filtering, IMAP mail with SSL, Webmail, and all incoming mail is also filtered through Amavisd, Spamassassin, Razor and can be sanitized by Anomy Sanitizer. These can also be turned off in different combinations per domain.

As of this writing, the $199 deal hasn’t been cut off, but likely will be soon. And starting June 1, they will supposedly be open for regular business.

Oh, and Dean keeps saying the final “feature lockdown” gamma release, v1.19, is imminent.