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Photomatt

Houston Press has an impressively long, detailed piece about Matt Mullenweg, aka photomatt, lead developer for the Open Source WordPress blog software. Matt dropped by to talk shop with my partners and I at the Polycot offices not long ago; he's a very smart guy, and we expect him to do great things in the future, including further development of WordPress, which is best of breed blog software – if Moveable Type is the Cadillac, WordPress is the Toyota of blog software. Quite a few Moveable Type users switched to WordPress when Moveable Type changed its payment structure, as described in the article:

It's unlikely that WordPress will ever charge users. For one thing, since the coding is available, someone else could just distribute it for free. That's the biggest reason for the explosion of users in the past several months. Several months ago, a competing (non-open-source) software, Movable Type, suddenly announced it would be charging its most active users. The Web exploded with posts about its developers, San Francisco-based Ben and Mena Trott, "sucker-punching the Weblogging community." Around the same time, the number of WordPress users spiked by several thousand.

Well-known blogger Mark Pilgrim, a big supporter of open-source software, wrote about the reasons for his switch on one of his 11 blogs: "This site now runs WordPress…I've taken the $535 that Movable Type would have cost me, and I've donated it to the WordPress developers. It's not about money; it's about freedom."

"Over the past few months, we have looked at a number of different types of Weblog software. [WordPress] has a full list of features, many of which have to do with the clean, easy-to-use user interface. Even novice computer users and Webloggers can publish regularly with this software. Although the underlying code and technologies used…are not my favorites, the set of features, growth of the platform and the large community all make WordPress a winning choice."

jon posted this at 8:52 AM
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