A couple days ago, Trent Reznor, the brains behind Nine Inch Nails, released a new album. This is the first album he's released since he left the major record label under which he was contracted. He's long been a proponent of more independently-created music specifically as it relates to musicians having to sign onerous contracts just to get a record out. That was the old way of doing things.  

For the past year at least, Trent Reznor's been talking about how he wanted to offer his audience different options for experiencing his music, all of which would be high-quality (he rightly wants control over the production quality of his music). If you go to his new site Ghosts you can see he offers five options ranging from free to $300 USD for experiencing his new album via download, cd, vinyl, etc. Well, there are only four options now that the $300 limited edition vinyl-and-gyclee-print package is sold out. He also mentions on the site quite a bit about how the overall process went. Fascinating stuff.

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What an awesome time we had last week at Webstock 08. For those of you not in New Zealand, Webstock is web-industry conference held here in Wellington every two years. This year the speakers included the likes of Tom Coates, Kelly Goto, Liz Danzico, Peter Morville, Michael Lopp, Kathy Sierra, and New Zealand's own Nat Torkington and Russell Brown, among many others.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My head is still spinning with the exciting ideas and conversations from the past few days at the conference. One thing that really came out as a common thread was the need for focus on people in all of the wonderful stuff we create for the web. That was a really nice tie-in to my very quick talk on What it means to be human at the 8x5 session. 

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In Jonathan Schwartz's recent blog post he talks about why Sun purchased MySQL and what it means for them and the internet industry at large. Sun paid $1,000,000,000 USD for MySQL which had $50,000,000 USD in revenue last year.

What does Sun get out of this? 

• The ability to tightly integrate and optimize MySQL for their own hardware.
• Positioning themselves more at the center of the LAMP-stack worldview of how the internet should be run.
• A stronger argument for associating Sun with datacenter solutions for the internet. Sun has had a long and complex history with Oracle. This move makes strengthens Sun's position against Oracle, especially because Oracle owns InnoDB, one of the core plug-in engines of MySQL.
• The chance to provide commercial support and services to organizations who otherwise may not choose MySQL.

All of the above are good for Sun and on the whole, good for the internet community.

What does this mean for SilverStripe?

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The dust has settled, but we're still buzzing from the Agile Barcamp in Wellington on 7 December. This was a contributor-organised all-day conference held in the gorgeous office space at the top of the Deloitte building in the CBD. At the previous E-government Barcamp one of the recurring topics was agile development and project management methods. Some of us who attended thought it would be a good idea to organise another barcamp focused on agile so we could more deeply explore some topics that were hinted at during the e-govt barcamp.

Some attributes of a barcamp are that it's not commercial (there were some generous sponsors who covered costs of food and t-shirts but attendance was free) nor polished in a traditional conference sense, and that it relies heavily on interaction betweent the presenters and attendees. There is no schedule of talks until the day of the event when people who want to speak put a yellow sticky up on a big sheet of paper, indicating where, when, and what they want to talk about. Sounds like it won't work, right? It actually works surprisingly well. It also gives people who roll up on the day a chance to present. That's a key point. 

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I imagine Barry Polley expertly swinging a machete to clear a path in a dense Honduran jungle. If Barry's never cleared a path in a jungle, I'd be surprised. Because that's exactly what he's doing at the Ministry of Justice.

Barry has authored the Ministry of Justice Open Source Discussion Paper which was just released. It's a broad and deep document that talks about open source in general and talks about specifics of why the New Zealand Ministry of Justice needs to adopt open source strategies. (Full disclosure: I reviewed a draft of this paper and provided some small amount of feedback)

Here are some highlights from the paper:

"The Ministry needs an explicit strategy to embrace the adoption and use of OSS [Open Source Software]. Our vendors are moving to OSS without our encouragement or consent...We cannot choose to keep OSS out of the Ministry; our choices are to accept our vendors' decisions as they occur, or to adopt OSS for strategic benefit on terms of our choosing."

"In summary, the adoption of OSS can lead to a more stable, supportable, and cost-effective IT environment, and should be pursued for pragmatic reasons. OSS adoption is not a panacea, and should proceed or not based on a particular package's merits. Given two equivalent packages, one open and one proprietary, the OSS one would be the preferable choice for reasons of better supportability and lower lifecycle cost."

"Knee-jerk prohibition of OSS is no longer feasible or cost-effective."

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What does it mean to "Be more human?" The concept of being more human has been running around in my head for a number of years now. The basic premise is this: we as people can group together with a few (dozen? thousand? million?) like-minded individuals and get some great stuff done. What is that "great stuff?" For me, the great stuff revolves around making the web easier, more fun, and more exciting.

The "Be more human" aspect really comes in when you think about what it would take to achieve that great stuff. In the web industry, those of us who create software and websites (those terms are almost indistinguishable for the kind of work we do) spend a lot of time in front of computer screens. Ten to sixteen hours a day is common. During those ten to sixteen hours it's easy for us to focus on the next new feature, the next browser compatibility issue, the next Ajax debugging technique. All those things need to be done, sure, but there needs to be more context. That context is, quite simply, being human.

What are the things that make us human? What are the things we value as individuals? These are the things that need to funnelled into our work, our software, our websites.   

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Hi everyone! I just wanted to make a quick post to say a few things about my new role as CEO of SilverStripe.

First, I do want to thank all the people in and around SilverStripe for making the product and the company what it is today. The founders and the rest of the staff of SilverStripe have done an amazing job to get the product where it is today whilst creating awesome websites for our clients. In fact, it's really the other way around: the work we do for our clients takes first priority and the SilverStripe CMS allows us to create better sites for our clients. And of course a big thanks goes out to the developer community and our Google Summer of Code students who all contribute to the SilverStripe product and community in numerous ways.

I'm humbled and honoured to be in this role. The company truly is in a great position to do some (more) amazing things in the coming weeks, months, and years.

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Last Saturday I (Brian) went to the NZ egov barcamp here in Wellington. It was a wonderfully informal event attended by about 80 or so of the New Zealand website creation crowd and government representatives who care about how government websites get built.

I gave a talk on the RFP process, while others spoke about Agile techniques, microformats, identity management, open source issues in government, accessibility, multi-output rendering based on single document source, risk management theory and practice, and more. Here's a mindmap of many of the ideas presented.

It was inspiring to see very clued-in government people aware of and eager to fix issues around "how to make e-government better in New Zealand". There are a number of follow-up items for myself and others to further ideas brought up during the sessions.

I love Wellington. :-)

Oh yeah, there are already rumours of a follow-on barcamp based on some of the common themes presented... stay tuned for more.
 

We are pleased to announce the beta version of our free, open source e-commerce module!

Our e-commerce module is the result of SilverStripe's knowledge gained through implementing some complex e-commerce websites such as Parents, Inc. and Perweek.

Key e-commerce module features include:

• Support for the following payment gateways; Worldpay, and DPS
• Paypal support is coming in the production version
  
• Easily integrates into existing SilverStripe websites
• Easy to extend and customise
• Can calculate shipping prices based on shipping country
• Automatically generates receipts
• Reporting on the performance of your store

Our e-commerce module comes under the same license as the rest of our CMS.

Enjoy! 

 

SilverStripe is growing! On the success of our 2007 Google Summer of Code and recent client work, we have heaps of work on and more coming in. We're looking to fill out our core development team with a fantastic developer.

For details, check out our career page.