One of my wife’s high school friends, Todd Marrone, passed during Christmas. Todd worked as an art teacher in Philadelphia schools for 15 years. I never met him, but after hearing the news, my wife was telling me about him. She was showing me some of his YouTube videos, including a TED talk from 2011. It’s a beautiful talk, and from the sounds of it, a fitting introduction to Todd and his ideas about being a great teacher:
We’ve reached a milestone of sorts. In the last few weeks I’m seeing a lot of people celebrating 10 years of contributing to open source. Many of the most prominent and inspiring people behind the growth of Joomla, Drupal and WordPress started contributing in 2003 and 2004.
I’ve known Vic Drover for a long time now. We started talking when he launched one of the first ever commercial GPL businesses back in 2007. The next year, we did a Joomla class together in Las Vegas and then were two of the speakers at the first ever CMSExpo in Chicago. We’ve keep talking almost every week since. The summer, we reached a fork in the road with Admincredible. Members of our team were getting really busy in other areas of their life and at the same time the Admincredible platform needed a substantial extra investment to go where…
I’ve been heavily involved with Joomla and, to a lesser extent, Drupal for a good number of years now. During that time, I’ve seen forks come and go but they’ve never really sparked my interested. Here are 6 reasons why: #1. Money. I’ve kids, a wife and a mortgage so I need to pay the bills. There’s rarely enough money in small projects to pay the bills and forks are always small projects. #2. Open source. I’m far more attached to open source than I am to any brand name such as Joomla, Drupal or WordPress. I work with open…
I’m starting to think about my Joomla World Conference presentation for November. I’m planning to talk about how people become involved in open source projects and about the legacy they leave behind when they leave.
Six years ago, I quit teaching and became a full time web designer. At that point I had three things to my name: An old iBook laptop with more broken keys than working keys. Two months of summer holiday pay from my last teaching job. A spare bedroom to use as an office.
Here’s one of the subscribers we got to after advertising on Facebook for a week. We targeted only people in the U.S.:
I was watching the U.S. healthcare debate play out yesterday and it got me thinking. I thought back to when our own industry was dominated by legal arguments, most of them half-digested and poorly-sourced. Including my own. The GPL debates in open source were not a fun time and they dragged on for years. So, I did some looking back and unless I’m missing something, the last real argument about the GPL was in July 2010, two years in the past.
[UPDATE] I was nervous before posting this but want to thank everyone for the big response. I’ve heard from a lot of people today and the great thing is many of them agree: we need to raise our game. The future can be bright. There are a lot of opportunities out there for Joomla. We just sometimes need to be reminded to go and grab them. Sorry, Disqus is being a real pain and comments are sometimes missing on this thread after a server move. Instead of commenting, go and do something positive. You’ll feel much better, I promise. Help…
I always cringe when seeing people try to build an open source rival to Facebook. Projects like Diaspora gain publicity as a nice idea, but get little real traction. However, I’ve come to believe that there is a potentially viable and very real open source rival to Facebook … WordPress. That might sound silly at first, but hear me out: