Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

The other day Bloggin Pro posted a question “Would You Pay for WordPress and How Much?“.  Of course, I’ve already mentioned that I have no problem paying for WordPress.  How much?  Well, I think that around $50 per installation is a fair price.  But that is not for me to decide.

I thing I keep thinking about though.  A big part of what WordPress is, is it’s freedom. Anyone can get it. Anyone can use it for whatever they want.  Anyone can modify it.  And a lot of people do.  If WordPress will ever become commercial software, it will greatly decrease the amount of people who use it, test it, and develop for it.  And with that, the value of WordPress will stop growing as it is now.  Once the value of it will stop growing as it is now, a lot of people will reconsider their answer to the question “Are you prepared to pay for WordPress?”.

Gladly, Matt and the rest of the Automattic gang seem to clearly understand that.

Over the last couple of years I’ve been working a lot with these four applications - WordPress, CakePHP, SugarCRM, and RT.  Each of these is beautiful in its own way.  Each of these tools is an Open Source Software. Each of these tools has a large community. Each of these tools has a free and commercial support and development. Each of these can be used in a number of ways to solve a whole range of problems.  Let me briefly introduce each one of them.

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Slashdot is running the post about annoying software.  The fact that Slashdot crowd mostly consists of computer geeks is sort of a guarantee for some interesting comments.

With my Fedora 9 saga I had to review and try a lot of new software.  Needless to say, I found quite a few annoying bits.  Here is a brief list, just to give you an idea:

• Clock applet in Gnome. It shows calendar with Sunday being first day of the week.  If you don’t like it, you’ll have to recompile your locale to change it. This one is cancelled out though by an excellent support of Google Calendar (or, for that matter, any other web published calendar).
• Metacity window manager in Gnome. Window titles are displayed in the middle.  This is really annoying for those of us who are used to seeing them on the left.  There is no option to change this setting either in GUI or in GConf.
• Pidgin new message notification. I once had it popping up nice looking bubbles, but I don’t remember how I managed to do it.  I also don’t remember how I managed to break it.  And I have no idea to bring them back.  I really miss them though.
• WordPress 2.5 post editing screen. It has been much reworked in the latest version and looks and feels so much better. However, the list of categories was moved from a really convenient location on the right of the screen to a really inconvenient location at the bottom of the screen.
• FileZilla FTP manager. This one drives me nuts with server connections.  It either disconnects every 40 seconds when being idle.  Or it keeps multiple connections open forever and most FTP servers block me out temporary.
• Request Tracker (RT3). Works perfectly with queues and tickets, but annoys the heck out of me when I need to do something with users.  Users aren’t first level citizens, like tickets.
• SugarCRM. Excellent business tool, with lots of small annoyances, like not being able to set default user role, disable theme selector everywhere, change logos to company ones, lock down the functionality, etc.  Most of these are easily fixable.  But some aren’t as trivial as they may sound or seem.
• Google Reader. This one annoys me a bit (but often) when I want to leave a few items in the feed unread and go deeper into archives.  Somehow it keeps marking everything I passed as read.

Now, what piece of software were you annoyed with recently?

There is an interesting post at The Open Source Advocate blog - “Win the desktop, and you will win the server“.  Tristan Rhodes, the author of the blog, suggests that in order for an operating system to conquer the server market, it should first conquer (or fight reasonable well for) the desktop market.

I have to admit that when I just read the article, I felt almost like agreeing.  But something kept buzzing me from the inside, so I kept that tab open for a few days.  Now that the post was processed at the back of my brain, I have to say that I don’t agree with that point.

There is, of course, a correlation.  Once sysadmins start using something they like on the desktop, it’s pretty soon that they try to see how well that thing handles server tasks.  So, of course, people using Windows on the desktop were checking out how to make a server out of it.

But.  I don’t think that conquering the desktop is the only way to the server.  Not at all. There are more ways, I somehow feel that those other ways are actually simpler.  For one thing, Linux has never been particularly good with desktops.  However, only the stubbornest and the most ignorant of sysadmins will argue against Linux server superpowers.

Furthermore, real sysadmins (which are, of course, in the minority) clearly understand the differences between a desktop computer and a server.  What’s good for one might not be so good for the other.

And then there is this whole “enterprise” issue.  Big companies (aka “enterprises”) aren’t about desktops.  They are about support services, customizations, and having someone to blame.  If there is someone on the other end of the twisted phone cord, they’ll grab him with both hands.

The historical examples in the Open Source Advocate’s blog post might be related or they might not.  The times were different anyway.  But even if these examples are related, they aren’t as heavy as they seem.  There are many factors to consider (prices, distrubution, documentation, hardware requirements, etc).

What do you guys think?

Fedora 9 is coming Real Soon Now ©. I mentioned before that I am desperately waiting for this release, since it brings KDE 4 and Firefox 3. One thing that I haven’t seen noticed anywhere until I read this interview is “preupgrade”. It sounds pretty cool:

By now, the “preupgrade” package should be available in updates-testing for Fedora 8. Enable the updates-testing repo and install it. It currently shows up as “Upgrade Fedora” in your Applications -> System menu.
From there, it’s very simple - follow the screens to choose what to upgrade to, wait for everything to download, hit “Reboot”, and the upgrade will begin!

Basically, what happens is that Fedora 9 installer is downloaded together with all the required packages, while you are still using Fedora 8. Once everything is in place, you can simply reboot and upgrade your system, without burning any CDs or DVDs or waiting for long downloads while having nothing to do.