I recently upgraded to WordPress 3.1 and was surprised to find that my permalinks had broken. So I did the usual round of plugin testing, first deactivating and then reactivating, but I couldn’t isolate it as a plugin problem.

Then I moved on to testing the permalink settings themselves, checking (and regenerating) the .htaccess file, then testing alternate permalink structures. And I found, essentially, that 3.1 requires a little more tidiness from me.

Previously, my site had run with this Custom Structure, which overrides the native WordPress category archives but did work until the 3.1 upgrade. Under Admin | Settings | Permalinks:

After testing alternate configurations, I found that this structure continues to work in 3.1 without a hitch:

So the issue was my archive system override. (From a usable-URL standpoint, the second structure, /%category%/%postname%/, is cleaner. But it’s disfavored for performance reasons; WordPress documentation indicates that %category% as the first element of a permalink Custom Structure adds database load and slows down the site.)

So providing an alternate Category base, as follows, took care of the problem:

I’ve been a follower of the open source software movement for some years, although as a non-techie I have less claim on the OSS culture than certain friends and colleagues.   Still, it’s a fascinating realm for an intellectual property lawyer / student of organizational behavior.

It’s also produced a range of software that I find myself using often, or even daily.   So I thought I’d take a minute to inventory the open source projects on which I rely.  Turns out to be a long list:

Office Productivity

• OpenOffice.org desktop office suite.
• KeepNote list and note-taking application.
• Feng Office virtual office suite (especially for its contact management / CRM capabilities).
• Firefox web browser.
• Thunderbird email reader.
• PDFsam tool for splitting and reassembling PDF files.  (When you need it, you need it.)
• Whyteboard paint program for annotating PDFs.
• PDFCreator print driver to create PDFs.
• GNUCash double-entry bookkeeping.
  

Music

• MuseScore editor for complex music notation.
• Audacity audio recording and editing program.

Imaging

• Inkscape vector illustration tool.
• Gimp photo editor.
• Debugmode FrameServer video post-production tool which serves individual frames of video from one program to another.  (An oddly useful thing to do, as it turns out.)

Web publishing

• FileZilla FTP client.
• PuTTY.  Nope, I’m not afraid of the command line.  (Yup, I probably should should be.)

Under the hood

• 7-zip file compression utility.
• LAMP web server stack.

The kicker is, of course, that each of these projects was developed using non-traditional economic models.  Some are easy to grasp: a big software company like Sun decides to release their in-house office suite; programmers need base tools (like LAMP) for other work, so they invent clever ways to collaborate and piece those tools together; a guy in his dorm room captures a following among fellow hackers.

But I’d submit that there’s more to even the obvious stories: how these projects gained traction outside the original developer’s head; how they got good enough for daily use; how they turned the organizational corner into a sustained and active development community.

Clever use of copyright law is part of these stories.  OSS lives by combining the rights of copyright ownership with very particular licensing terms: code can be redistributed, but only subject to conditions that keep future developments open source.  So OSS isn’t a donation-based model that only works for techno-hippies.  It’s, instead, a brilliant application of law and economics — just one that’s more complex than “I make software and you buy it from me.”

The result is, at least potentially, spontaneous organization.  And a lot of great software.

There’s lots of interesting fodder for conversation around copyright law, its use, and its potential reform.  Before weighing in properly, I’d like to simply collect links for some of the best discussions I’ve read.

Most interesting to me is the way writers and artists are weighing in.  It’ll be interesting to see how their comments filter, via a tangled web of lobbyists, through to Congress.

But on to the links:

Jason Robert Brown, the Broadway composer, posts a fascinating exchange with a teenage sheet music sharer, under the title “Fighting With Teenagers: A Copyright Story.”  I like the post — and the comments, of course — because Mr. Brown ends up focusing more on ethics, less on economics or existing law.  (Which is a good way to start any conversation on what the law ought to be.)

David Pogue, for the NY Times, responds to Mr. Brown in “No Easy Answers in the Copyright Debate,” legitimizing this as a debate with two sides.  In some cases, Pogue argues, copyright law raises barriers to just the kinds of artistic endeavor that it’s supposed to encourage.

And Tony Woodlief weighs in with essentially the same point in today’s WSJ, under the title “Curse of the Greedy Copyright Holders.”  I like Woodlief’s article for the way he writes, the way he’s chewing on the issues, and the perspective.  He writes more as a writer and less as a commentator, if that distinction makes sense.

More to come.  Meantime, I’m thinking about the way this conversation separates into ethics, law, and economics.  Although, eventually, they do need to weave together in some sensible way.

One of my early jobs with SSV Media was to find a decent web hosting company.  So I cast around (I’ll write more about that process later…) and came up with Media Temple.  Couldn’t be more pleased.

Media Temple offers various flavors of “grid” hosting, so they spread the computing work over several machines and can ramp up available horsepower if there’s a traffic spike.  We’ve put that to the test by hosting streaming video for SSV clients, with excellent results.  Uptime has been stellar, tech tools usable, pricing reasonable.

But here’s my favorite thing: MT is incredibly transparent and responsive.  When rare problems have come up, they’ve been quick to post public information on point, with updates on their work to fix it.  Very refreshing to hear about potential problems before–or even instead of–seeing them on my sites.

(A note in closing: I pay MT to host this blog, but they haven’t paid me in any way for a good review.  Payment for editorial coverage sucks, and I won’t accept it.)

Open source licensing is important — and often overlooked, to the detriment of the community.  In many cases, license provisions are easy to follow, but here’s a puzzle:

This blog runs (1) on WordPress, using (2) Joshua Sowin’s implementation of (3) the Blueprint CSS framework.  Each of these three credits represents an excellent piece of work, but each uses a different open source license: WordPress uses the GPL; Sowin uses Creative Commons; and Blueprint uses a modified MIT license.

Sowin is right to apply his choice of license to his work as derived from Blueprint — the generous terms of the MIT license allow him to do that.

But his work is also derived from WordPress itself, at least arguably: here’s a post arguing that any theme used on WordPress has to be licensed under the GPL, subject to the GPL’s particular permissions and restrictions.  The comments are as interesting as the post itself — exemplary of the confusion that can come into a puzzle like this, and of the stakes involved.

What’s a licensing developer to do?  WordPress provides an answer in a posted legal opinion from the Software Freedom Law Center, but it’s complicated: PHP files have to be GPL’d; other elements don’t.

Not a very clean answer, and one that warrants further discussion here.  Watch for updates as I flesh out this draft discussion.

Meantime, as the grateful user of Sowin’s work, my job is easier to parse  (I don’t think you have to be a lawyer to figure this out): give credit where credit is due.  That’s why, of course, you see each 0f the above three credits in this site’s footer.