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Microsoft Migrating Live Spaces Users To WordPress
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has decided it can't compete with the established blogging platforms out there and will instead embrace one of them. Talking at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Dharmesh Mehta, Director of Product Management for Windows Live, announced that all existing Windows Live Spaces users will be migrated over to an account at WordPress.com. This decision is one Microsoft has prepared for, and the CEO of Automattic, the company that runs and develops the WordPress platform, was also present on stage with Mehta. The two companies have worked together to ensure Spaces users will take all of their data with them when migrating and have visitors automatically forwarded to the new URL associated with their blog."
The GPL only requires that you make available the original source, and your changes to it, to anyone who receives the executable form from you, and you must make them available without restriction as to how they are used. If you don't publish the executable, there is no requirement to publish source and changes.
It simply boils down to "was LiveSpaces paying for itself?". And the answer would be no, so now MS gets to have a PR day while dumping a cost centre onto someone else. Double win for MS - doesn't say anything about IIS, Asp.net or MSSql one way or the other tho.
Microsoft may not like GPLv2, but at least it's not GPLv3. There's only basic patent language in v2, and v3 really turbo-charges the language, providing much better protection from software patent lawsuits.
But in some ways it's a moot point, as Microsoft won't be hosting or distributing any of this software (AFAIK), they're just pointing some of their customers over there for service.
And hey, if it throws some extra money towards Automattic, then that's cool, too.
coding is life
The GPL is an anathema to Microsoft precisely because if they modify the source code, they must contribute changes back
A common misreading of the GPL, certainly, but a misreading nonetheless.
The stock GPL requires that you provide source code to anyone who possess binaries you've produced. Obviously this doesn't apply to web applications, which is why the AGPL exists.
What is good for an enterprise is not necessarily good for your average blog. Well, there you go, that was pretty easy to spin (if you insist on calling a rational statement 'spin' anyway).
It's spin because it's plausible, but factually incorrect. From the Wordpress.com website:
There are over 27 million WordPress publishers as of September 2010: 13.9 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com plus 13.8 million active installations of the WordPress.org software....
According to Quantcast, over 260 million people worldwide visit one or more WordPress.com blogs every month, and they view over 2.1 billion pages on those blogs each month....
(Bolded for your convenience.)
A chart showing Wordpress performance vis a vis Blogger, Movable Type and Typepad.
Smells like enterprise to me.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
No, it's not. IIS and ASP.Net aren't competing with WordPress. If Microsoft was moving Live Spaces from IIS/ASP.Net to Linux/PHP, then it would have a point.
Microsoft is shutting down Live Spaces because it wasn't profitable/strategic to them, not because the platform was unable to keep up.