Live from Austin!

SixApart have finally released MovableType as open source software under the GPL. I may take a look at it, as it has a working plugin called Privacy that provides for locked postings people have to authenticate to read–something WordPress doesn’t seem able to do at the moment.

MT supports pretty much everything else I need that WordPress has, including categories, tags, OpenID, Atom, and search. Intriguingly, it also allows multiple users with separate sites via a single MT installation. I’m almost tempted to set up a service for anyone I know who wants to leave LJ-land…

There has been a lot of GPLv3 discussion on tech sites. Perhaps predictably, a lot of it has missed the point or miscategorized the changes.

If you read the history of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Public License, you discover that it all came about because Richard Stallman found himself having to use broken software that he wasn’t allowed to fix. The entire purpose of the GPL is to ensure that everyone who uses a piece of GPL-licensed software can change that software, use the changed version, and distribute it to other people.

The GPLv3 changes are not some radical new direction, there’s no bait-and-switch going on. The problem is simply that a number of organizations have found ways to use GPL-licensed software, but still break the spirit of the license by preventing users from being able to change the software, use the changed version, and distribute it.

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Q: Suppose you could have any career you wanted, without regard for practicality or ability to pay the rent. What would your career be, and why? And if it isn’t your current career, why not?

I’ll start.

I’d write software and books. Open source software, and probably mostly technical books.

I could be wrong, but I think my code is better than a lot of the open source stuff, and there are endless places where the available code could use major improvement. Just simple things, like a decent desktop RPN calculator for KDE, a working replacement for fetchmail, and so on.

Technical books, because documentation is the other problem with open source. A lot of it is awful, and that’s when it exists at all.

Sure, there are sexier fantasy careers, like rock star or brain surgeon. But I’d be improving the world in a modest way, doing something which I know I can do well.

Why don’t I? Because for the forseeable future I’m going to need a steady income. I can’t even deal with the “work six months, take six months off” plan, because I’d die from the stress.