Since reddit’s beginning, we have stood on the shoulders of giants in the open source world. Every library, tool and platform we depend on is open. Until now, the only portion of reddit that wasn’t freely available is reddit itself. We are proud and excited that we’re finally giving back to the community that has given us so much.

Reddit started with Lisp back in the Y Combinator days. Then moved to web.py, and recently moved again to Pylons — it is one of the biggest Python-based website based on open sourced web framework, and now it is open sourced itself! Its git repository is now available online for everyone to see — delicious! It is certainly going to be a great resource for all Python developers to peek into the “how” of scaling a Pylons site.

Then TechCrunch picked up the story, after being invited to the announcement party. They worded the announcement as though Reddit is trying to compete with Digg by open sourcing its code.

Of course, to most SV journalists covering Web 2.0, “code” is nothing more than what is powering their profit-less website so they can raise venture funds, and “free software” merely means you don’t have to pay for it.

Reddit, the news voting site that was bought by Conde Nast in 2006, is making the code behind its site open source… That means anyone can now make their own Digg-like site. Not that there has been any lack of Digg clones in the past. Reddit’s move to open-source its software is merely an acknowledgment that it is already a commodity.

There are many other push-button products that are far easier to set up than open sourced Reddit, so that makes this recent announcement redundant? By no means. The source code of an actual website is the best way for any developer to learn — far better than any tutorial out there. It is all about empowering the programmers. It is like you are a car mechanics, an Aston Martin DB9 drives into the garage, and you are free to inspect any aspect of this beautiful craft… And people on the outside said, “oh, only because it is slower than the Ferrari”. Huh?!

Finally, I reached the now-or-never moment with my manager. I considered quitting anyway. I considered my mortgage payment. I took stock of my personal finances. My mortgage payment won out. I sat down and did what they paid me to do. It’s hard to live up to your principles. If it were easy, your principles probably aren’t worth a damn anyway.

I believe that “freedom” is a core principle that many of us hold towards software. However in reality, many are still working on proprietary software that comes with extensive EULA that limits the end users and other developers in every way. There are actually companies who deliberately obscure the specification to make interoperability difficult, so to increase the effort of the competition. Shocking!

However, when such principle is confronted with other needs in life, in this case the mortgage payment, sometimes it does not take much struggle to sacrifice the principle, saying No to open source. Oh, I still have a big mortgage to pay off, one wife and two kids to feed, etc. It is simply too hard to live up to the principles that worth more than a damn, so I cave in.

I do believe however, that there is an alternative — to actually live up the principle and take the consequence. In some sense it would actually be a more logical action if we so much believe in that principle. Trusting in Jesus is a great principle but do expect unwelcoming from the world. Pray that I won’t cave in.

When you cross people’s money making business, expect back fires. So the designers strike back with their own perspective. After all, there are many starving artists that need the dole, and what right does Matt/WordPress.org have preventing them getting wages from their work?

Then Matt posted a new article Plugin Authors Get No Love, arguing WordPress plugins are no less useful, equally sophisticated to create, but rarely have sponsored links bundled. The title was a bit misleading I think, as many interpreted “love” as getting monetary rewards.

But anyway. One week later, I think I am going to write a bit of my point of view on this matter.

I Have Been On Both Sides

I just need to declare that I have actually been on both sides of the fence. I am a coder at heart, and I have developed and released a few WordPress plugins, including the popular Permalink Redirect plugin, which frequent many people’s top 10 WP plugin lists, especially amongst the SEOs. All my WP plugins are released under GNU General Public License. Some of my other work are released under even more liberal Public Domain, i.e. no license term at all!

However back in 2003 I actually started a theme/style site for Movable Type, when free themes/styles were not readily available. Due to other commitments I asked someone to take over the site — I literally just gave that site away with more than one year of domain rego left! Come to think of it, what was I thinking that I gave away a PR6 site with 160+ inbound links for FREE! I must have been crazy! The same guy who took over the domain have done nothing over the last two years, and yet it is still a PR6 site.

Crap. Am I stupid or not?

After all I am more than just a coder at heart. I am an open source coder deep down who believe artistic creation (code is poetry, remember?) should be shared to make collaborative improvement a reality. Ultimately I would like to see more Movable Type themes developed and added into the repository, although I did not have any time developing it. So I was thinking, “hey if I pass it onto someone else, he can continue all the work!” Places like Sitepoint Marketplace has never entered into my mind.

I guess it is what sets many plugin developers and theme developers apart. As I replied Matt’s post:

Plugin developers are programmers who understand the benefit and reason behind open source/free software. Theme developers are designers who do not necessary understand FOSS.

Not saying one is superior than the other, but just two different groups of people coming from two different backgrounds.

Okay. With that background in mind, let us look at some implications.

Designers Making Money From Themes? By All Means!

As much as I believe in open source, I also believe that credit should be given where credit is due. If you are a graphics designer who love to make beautiful themes for popular content management systems, and are making money from doing so — congratulation!

I have seen people argue that since WordPress is free, people should not ride on the bandwagon, create an economy around it and make some money from it. He/she has obviously misunderstood the definition of free in Free Software. There is no license restriction on making money from open source/free software product.

So the GNU guys do not mind people making money on free software, but the next question is, whether making money off free software is ethical? In my own opinion, there is no two different ethics between free and proprietary software. Instead, ethical or not should totally base on how the money is made.

Ethics in Monetising the Themes

There are several ways for designers to monetising themes that I can think of.

• Pay per design — many companies monetising in FOSS world by providing value-add services. There are also many high profile bloggers or company blogs out there that need more than just the default Kubrick theme. Many are willing to pay for high quality designs.

• Pay per download — you have created the most coveted and versatile WordPress theme in the world. Charge 10 bucks per download.

• Ask for donation — it is not too hard to put a PayPal donation button on the sidebar, is it?

• Sponsored link — now we are getting into the gray area! Google does not like it as it pollutes SERP. Personally I think taking sponsors and add a link into footer of your theme template is okay, as long as you make full disclosure, including appropriate license terms.

  For example on the download page, theme developer needs to say “This theme is sponsored by such and such, and a link is included in the footer of the page. As it is released under Creative Common Attribution license, please leave the copyright notice.”

  Then the person who is downloading and using theme is fully acknowledged the existence of the sponsored links, and what he/she can/cannot do with the template.

Again in my opinion a theme with sponsored links without disclosure is considered spammy and unethical, especially the ones with blackhat tricks like cloaking and invisible DIVs. If you can only get people downloading your themes without the disclosure, then maybe your theme is not good enough. Go back to your PhotoShop! :)

GNU GPL or Creative Commons?

One issue (or advantage from a different perspective) with Creative Commons (CC) licenses is — they are essentially copyright lite. Attribution is always required in CC, so there is no way to remove the usual copyright notice at the bottom of each theme, usually with a complimentary link back to the theme developer. Worse, there are themes with Attribution + NoDerivs license that forbids any derivative work based on licensed product. That simply means, if there are hard coded sponsored links in the template, you cannot touch them!

If it is how many themes are licensed, no wonder they are in deep conflict with WordPress, which is licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL). GPL gives the receiver of the end product every freedom except imposing restriction on others. From legal point of view, I can grab WordPress, rename it to something else, change source code here and there, shrink wrap it, and sell it for $5,000 a copy without acknowledging Matt and co, as long the source code is provided to my buyer, and they can do whatever they want with it (including selling it for $10,000). Maybe it is not ethical, as in a case I have looked at previously. But it does tell you what really matters to the open source/free software people — freedom for the developers to do whatever you want.

And I consider it was this freedom that made WordPress a more preferred blogging platform than its closest competitor back in May 2004, when Movable Type stopped being “free”. Mark Pilgrim’s post is the one article that I constantly referred back to.

Therefore licensing plugins or themes under any more restrictive licenses is against the central philosophy of WordPress, or any other free software. Duncan Riley didn’t get it — the fall of SixAprt started when the community were upset, but they were upset because people realised that this software is not really free.

(Just a side note — I have been looking for forum software to kick start a community site. However I am not touching SMF nor MyBB, as those so-called “free” forum software are not really free if you check their license terms. Still waiting for phpBB 3 to release…)

Removing Themes from Theme Gallery

Not only because sponsored theme confuses visitors, but also because of this philosophy difference, I completely agree with Matt that they should be removed from WordPress official sites.

Another reason, which I believe Matt would also agree, is that how difficult it was to come clean after being accused of spamming. For some they are tainted for life, and I am sure Matt would not put the WordPress brand in jeopardy again.

That does not mean sponsored themes will not continue. Designers from everywhere are still free to take sponsorships for themes they made. They just will not be listed under the WordPress brand, that’s all. Weblog Tools Collection is still happy to list them, as long as sponsorships are made known.

Other Thoughts?

Other random thought pieces on this matter that cannot be put logically anywhere, so I shall just append them here.

• Plugins IMO are actually easier to write because:

  1. I am a coder, not a graphics designer. I don’t even own a copy of PhotoShop.
  2. I write plugins because I have an itch to scratch, and somehow made it distributable along the way. Not true when you are developing a theme.
  3. Plugins can be short (less than 10 lines). No one will use a theme that contains less than 10 lines of CSS.
  4. Browser compatibility is rarely an issue with plugins.

  Then again theme developers rarely have to suffer answering support questions, make sure it works in a few popular versions of WP, different hosting platform, etc. Support question is a killer — I probably spent 5x more time answering emails and forum posts on my plugins, then actually writing the code.

• If your lively hood solely depends on making sponsored WordPress themes, then please go and find a real job.

That’s all folks!

My two-year-old can say “Firefox”. I point at the plush toy and say, “What’s this?” and he says “Firefox!” and clutches it with both hands and pulls it to his chest. I say, “Can I have the firefox?” and he says, “No, my firefox!” I say, “Can you share the firefox?” and he says, “No sharing!” We.re still working on that whole Free Software / Free Culture thing. Apparently it doesn’t apply to plush toys. Or maybe it just doesn’t apply to two-year-olds.

Maybe I should be starting to collect open source software plush toys. Any place selling them here besides EverythingLinux? Might check eBay. I can’t wait to teach Anna “See! Good penguin. Bad daemon.”

There are many ways putting videos online. You can either:

1. Upload your AVI/QuickTime/WMV files onto a folder somewhere inside your hosting account.
2. Use a third party video hosting service like Google Video or YouTube.

Personally I don’t like (2). You need to upload your videos to that 3^rd party, and you have little control over how the final outcome will be encoded (bit rate, frame rate, quality, etc). Moreover, there are terms and conditions that you need to read through, let along agreeing to. At the end, who owns the rights to uploaded video?

Being a control freak (well, only over the systems that I need to manage), I have always preferred option (1) by hosting video files inside my own accounts, which has some crazy amount of space and data transfer anyway. Except you don’t get that nice Flash applet which you can embed into your own pages, so visitors can <click> and watch the video without leaving the page. They don’t need to worry about saving onto the desktop, which media player to use, whether codec has been installed, etc. They Just Works^TM — perfect for the grand-parents :)

With a bit of time wasted on research and mocking around, it turns out that you can easily achieve the effect of embedded flash video, and yet host the video files on your own server. And there’s zero penny you need to spend — all can be done via these open source software, FFmpeg and FlowPlayer.

The Basis

Here’s a summary of what needs to be done.

1. Convert the video file into a suitable format for Flash players.
2. Upload the converted file onto hosted account.
3. Upload the Flash player if hasn’t been done.
4. Paste HTML code snippet into the web page.

Flash players can only play video files encoded into the FLV (Flash Video) format, which is also the format used by Google Video and YouTube. To do so the open source way is use the universal encoder, FFmpeg.

FFmpeg

Installing FFmpeg is trivial — at least on my Gentoo boxes :) Make sure appropriate USE flags are used during emerge. For example I have:

  USE="aac amr encode ogg vorbis x264 xvid zlib" emerge ffmpeg

Other Linux distribution? Not using Linux? Err. Good luck.

To convert a movie using FFmpeg, do the following:

$ ffmpeg -i movie.avi movie.flv

It will then convert the AVI file into FLV Flash Video. FFmpeg can also handle many different container types, for example QuickTime, WMV1 (not WMV3 at the moment), MPEG4, etc, so just throw the video at it and see whether it handles it.

There are many command line options that you can use to alter the encoding behaviour. For example if I wish to rescale the movie to 320×240, with 15 frame/sec, at video at 250kbps and audio down-sampling to 22,050Hz at 48kbps, I just tell FFmpeg to do it on the command line:

$ ffmpeg -i movie.avi -s 320x240 -r 15 -b 250 -ar 22050 -ab 48 movie.flv

There are many more options so do check out their manual if you are interested.

There is another thing that we need to do — create a JPEG thumbnail for previewing. This will be displayed in the otherwise empty canvas of the flash player, before [Play] is pressed. For convenience sake, we’ll take the very first frame of the video.

$ ffmpeg -i movie.avi -f mjpeg -t 0.001 movie.jpg

FLVTool2

FLVTool2 is needed to calculate and update meta data in the FLV file. Well, you don’t really need it as you can already play the FLV file spill out from FFmpeg, but because of the missing info, Flash player cannot show the buffering status and current playing position, etc.

I was hesitated to install FLVTool2 because (1) it depends on Ruby which I need to emerge (2) it does not have an ebuild for it. But anyway, having it running is still trivial.

1. Make sure you already have Ruby installed.
2. Download the latest FLVTool2
3. Unpack the tarball, change into its directory, and run ruby setup.rb all as root.

Now just run

$ flvtool2 -U movie.flv

Well, installation is actually optional. You can pretty much run FLVTool2 from inside its unpacked directory, for example.

$ RUBYLIB=lib ruby bin/flvtool2 -U <path to>/movie.flv

Your FLV is ready to go! Upload both FLV and generated JPEG thumbnail onto your web hosting account. Make sure they are in the same folder.

FlowPlayer

FlowPlayer is an open source Flash video player that is light-weight (at around 22kb), and pretty easy to configure. Download the latest version from SourceForge.

Unpack the ZIP will give you the player file FlowPlayer.swf. Upload it somewhere on your website.

Now you need to cut and paste this HTML code snippet onto the web page you wish to show the video:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="[your site]/FlowPlayer.swf" width="320" height="263" id="FlowPlayer">
  <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain"/>
  <param name="movie" value="[your site]/FlowPlayer.swf"/>
  <param name="quality" value="high"/>
  <param name="scale" value="noScale"/>
  <param name="wmode" value="transparent"/>
  <param name="flashvars" value="baseURL=[base URL]&amp;videoFile=movie.flv
    &amp;autoPlay=false&amp;loop=false&amp;autoBuffering=false
    &amp;splashImageFile=movie.jpg"/>
</object>

[your site] is the URL to where you keep the FlowPlayer.swf. [base URL] is the directory where you keep the FLV and JPEG files. For example, the final URL to FLV file will be [base URL]/movie.flv.

Paste that onto your website, or into your blog post, and check whether it works!

Please check FlowPlayer documentation on the options going to flashvars.

Conclusion

In fact those steps can be easily automated with a bit of scripting. I shall be posting more movies on Anna’s website.

If your hosting companies are not very generous quota (i.e. small timers who can’t really oversell), or if you think your video will get digged and slashdotted and become overnight hit, then maybe having Google Video or YouTube to host for you is a wiser idea, just in case a huge hosting bill landing on your credit card statement.

Otherwise, you might choose to host those videos on your own account, and regain a bit of control.

Not bad. From a single CPU shared box to 4 dual-CPU dedicated servers. Again that shows how much community support there is in open source software.

Btw, the new FOCUS website is powered by Drupal. Much simpler, with around 20 pages. I might release it this weekend.