The Open Sourcerer

More on Number 10′s website fiasco

Being “that-kind-of-a-bloke”, I thought I’d dig a bit further into the Number 10 Steals Free WordPress Theme story

Here’s the background:

• No. 10 Are running WordPress¹
• The theme (or template) is based on one called NetWorker²
• The attribution and copyright notice that is in the original footer has been removed
• The site claims to be Crown Copyright and makes no reference to the CC-by-sa license used in the original template

I am a bit confused here. Why would a web design shop (or “Full Service New Media Agency” as they call themselves), who were apparently paid the best part of £100k for this job³, use somebody else’s template as the basis for their design?

• You might think it would be because using a pre-made template would save you loads of tricky coding and playing around with CSS trying to get your site to look the same in IE6, IE7, Firefox, Safari and Opera [A task I am quite familiar with myself].
• You might also think that using a pre-made template would allow you to make minor modifications, add some different images and give you something that looks really different.
• Of course it might be simply that you don’t have time to create a new theme from scratch and using an “off-the-shelf” template will mean you can get the site up and running much faster.
• Or another possibility could be that you like ripping off your customers for as much as possible and using a free (or even a bought) template will mean your costs are minimal.

All, some, or none of the above could be reasons to use an existing template as a basis for your new design.

So how much new coding would be needed making the changes to an existing template to suit your new design? 10%, 20%, maybe even 50% and it would still be worth while…

Get this: the revised stylesheet from Anthony Baggett’s template is more than 6 times the original’s length and size! And that isn’t all made up of whitespace either…

The original stylesheet⁴ is 612 lines in length and is 9234 bytes in size (9KB).

The modified stylesheet⁵ is 3826 lines long and weighs in at a frankly astonishing 63724 bytes (63KB)!

You can obviously download the two stylesheets from their websites directly (I recommend using a plugin for Firefox called Web Developer) or to make things easier, I have made them available at the bottom of this page.

Looking through the new file, the amount of duplication and repetition of styling of the same, or very similar elements, is quite odd. It certainly isn’t the way I would construct a theme. Why duplicate the same styling over, and over, and over again when you could craft the logic so that each of these elements have a commonality that could then be controlled with a much smaller stylesheet?

Here are a few screenshots showing some of the differences between the two files. In the brilliant Open Source comparison application Meld I’m using here, the original stylesheet is shown in the left pane and the modified one is on the right. The first image shows the very top of both files with Anthony’s header still in tact. The second and third are just a couple of fairly random points where the new file contains a great deal of repetition as I am walking down through the files. The final image shows the bottom of both files (note the line numbers!).

One thing that is clear from using a tool like Meld is that these two files are definitely related. The way the application displays the differences, it is clear where the files are the same and where they differ. The larger file is certainly a derivative work of Anthony’s original.

Another aspect I found rather funny in this investigation was the method of version control for this huge stylesheet. Both stylesheets have the same version number and there doesn’t appear to have been any tool used to update the header as would be usual. How on earth does a business that develops a ~4000 line stylesheet manage to do that without using some sort of versioning system?

I have helped businesses use and modify pre-made templates for Joomla!, and to be honest if you are making changes of any significance to these templates, it is almost always easier and quicker and cheaper to start from scratch. For small mods and changes pre-bought templates can be really good value (I mean $50 is fairly average), but getting your head around someone else’s code is never easy and takes considerable time. For major alterations it just doesn’t make financial sense.

Now, making additions and changes just to the stylesheet of more than 6 times the original is not good business sense in my opinion. How much more work have they done to the PHP code that we can’t see? We know they have modified at least index.php (by removing the WordPress statistic generator meta tag) and footer.php (by removing Anthony’s copyright notice). But if they have made SO MANY changes and additions to the stylesheet, there surely must be a good deal of altered php code, or additions, in the core php files too? Surely, it would have been easier to make a new template from scratch in this instance?

This leads on to the other question that might be worth digging into a bit more; GPL violations:

“If” the developers have modified the WordPress engine, as is being suggested as a possibility here, and then sold it to the Government, in my humble understanding that means they have distributed their modifications. That means those modifications must also be licensed under the GPL. I had a quick look on New Media Maze’s web site and couldn’t find an area for software downloads or mention of the GPL. That doesn’t say anything to be honest and there might be nothing to this, but it would be interesting to find out a bit more… Is there a real WordPress guru who can look at the “footprint” of the XHTML the site generates and tell if it is different? Or are there any other ways to tell if it has been modified?

Anyway, what a wheez this all is for us bloggers: It just isn’t Gordon’s year is it…

1. www.number10.gov.uk/
2. NetWorker Theme
3. £100k for WordPress site
4. Anthony’s original stylesheet
5. No. 10′s heavily modified stylesheet

Number 10 and the Creative Commons

Number 10′s new website, from our beloved government who are such strong users and supporters of Open Source Software [NOT], is running on WordPress. This isn’t actually big news now. There’s plenty of comment about that on the web via Google.

Well, that’s OK I guess. At last they are starting to grok OSS perhaps, although I’m rather inclined to actually surmise that they [#10] don’t even know what WordPress is. They just bought a website…

Anyway, quite a nice site layout don’t you think? I wonder who designed their site?

Looking at the html source, we see that the stylesheets are in a directory called networker-10/ and many of the images are in a subdirectory called images/.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<!-- leave this for stats please -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/wp-content/themes/networker-10/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<!--[if lte IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/wp-content/themes/networker-10/ie6.css" media="screen" />
<![endif]-->
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="/feed" />

Firstly, see the bit above where it says <!-- leave this for stats please -->? Usually, in there, that line reads: <meta name="generator" content="WordPress X.X.X" /> where the X.X.X is the version of WordPress the site is running.

So they’ve removed changed that then. I wonder if they are trying to conceal the fact they are using WP? Not a very useful trick though is it? Having a directory tree called /wp-content/themes/... is a bit of a giveaway if you ask me.

Now then, if you visit Antbag.com and look at some of the themes they have created, there’s one on there called “Networker”. Here’s the demo page http://antbag.com/demo/index.php?wptheme=NetWorker

Let’s look at the top few lines of the html source for this theme:

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.2" />
<!-- leave this for stats please -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://antbag.com/demo/wp-content/themes/networker-10/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<!--[if lte IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://antbag.com/demo/wp-content/themes/networker-10/ie6.css" media="screen" />
<![endif]-->
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://antbag.com/demo/?feed=rss2" />

They look quite similar don’t they? The directory structure is identical and the top-level theme directory is called networker-10. Amazing…

The Networker theme is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. Which you can read all about here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I can only assume that Number 10 have requested, and received, permission of the author to remove all traces of this license and attribution from their WordPress site. I have left a “contact us message” at the author’s website to see if this is the case…

[Update] Anthony Baggett, the theme’s author, has just confirmed that No 10 have not requested that the attribution be removed. That’s not playing fair by my book.

[Update 2] Seems like I am not the only one to have noticed this. A bit more digging has thrown up the following sites also commenting on #10′s cock-up. One is also suggesting it cost £100k. Not bad for a ripped off theme running on an Open Source blogging engine… Links below]
http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2008/08/16/prime-ministers-website-breaks-copyright-law/
http://community.livejournal.com/theyorkshergob/123043.html
http://www.mikerouse.net/2008/08/15/10-downing-street-wordpress-website-knock-off-and-rip-off/
http://dizzythinks.net/2008/08/downing-street-claims-crown-copyright.html

ISO gives up on IT Standards: approves OOXML

So, as everyone thought would happen, the naive and sycophantic ISO and IEC bodies have decided to ignore the appeals, the scandalous bribery and corruption of their hitherto decent standing and approve ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (OOXML to you and me).

The two ISO and IEC technical boards have given the go-ahead to publish ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML formats, as an ISO/IEC International Standard after appeals by four national standards bodies against the approval of the document failed to garner sufficient support.

And toward the end of the rather short press release they come up with this real gem:

The adoption process of Office Open XML (OOXML) as an ISO/IEC Standard has generated significant debate related to both technical and procedural issues which have been addressed according to ISO and IEC procedures.

Understating the blindingly obvious or what? And just what has been addressed exactly? Nothing it seems to me. They have just bent over and let M$ shove their specification where the sun don’t shine.

But, as we near the end of this farce and fiasco, I think there are a couple of ironies which mark the approval of OOXML, and the process surrounding, ultimately as being little more that a damp squib.

• The decision by Microshaft themselves to not bother with OOXML in their next Office release and to, even more amazingly, deliver native support for ODF.
• The fiasco has shown that ISO/IEC is basically now an irrelevance when it comes to defining useful standards within the sphere of IT. They are too slow, too ponderous and too “up-their-own-arses” to be able to recognise when they have been shafted.

We have plenty of excellent standardisation bodies which have fundamentally driven the creation of the Internet and they have all used community-based, open processes. IETF, W3C and so on.

All I remember the ISO ever giving me in IT was the notorious OSI 7 Layer Model way back in the 80s. And what happened to it? It died almost before it was born because an open, easy to implement and flexible protocol stack called TCP/IP came along…

Bye Bye ISO.

Crunch Proofing Your Business?

I know I’m kind of preaching to the converted here but I have been thinking about ideas to promote OSS, and our company’s services, here in the UK. And I’m particularly thinking about this with regards to our current economic climate, i.e. very dodgy.

For most of the readership of this blog it will come as no surprise that Open Source is a bloody great way to avoid spending money on software. That’s a very simple argument and one that has merit. But clearly capital cost isn’t the only answer and replacing existing infrastructure with something new, even if it is free, can be costly in other ways.

So are there other benefits and factors where Open Source Software solutions can be of distinct benefit in these rather troubled times?

Well I think there are, and I’ve dumped some of my rather random thoughts down here. I’d love to hear your opinion on them and get any other suggestions you may have too:

• To me, a major benefit of OSS to a business is when they are looking to deploy a new solution or service. Be it a CRM, or ERP, or perhaps their business model has changed and they need to actually do something fundamentally different to survive. Deploying OSS in this scenario is almost a no-brainer. You will have to pay to integrate this new service to some degree whatever solution you select; so why not use a free one and one that gives you an ability to adapt and change features in a far simpler way than with a proprietary system?
• But now, cash is really tight. It is even more important that your business gets every penny it can from any investment it makes. So there may be an even simpler argument: If you can’t afford to invest in a proprietary software solution but you can get similar functionality from a free OSS solution, can you really afford NOT to go down the OSS route? Your competitors probably will.
• Is OSS now the ONLY choice for the cash-strapped business? You can’t stand still. You have to do something to generate more leads/revenue/cash flow or improve operating efficiency etc. Standing still in our current climate is equivalent to going backwards in a growth economy.
• Vista bashing? Many firms will probably be getting close to needing an upgrade cycle on their desktops. Do they go Vista? There are a whole world of reason why not too, including performance, reliability, security and the need to upgrade hardware. Is OSS ready for the Desktop. Personally I think so; but does Joe Blogs? Can they be convinced? We are certainly hearing more positive noises in this direction but is it a step-too-far? The costs of replacing your desktop licenses is going to be pretty steep.
• How about bringing certain tasks back in-house? Many businesses will outsource to external companies specific jobs or functions that they use on a regular basis. By deploying OSS in-house, could they do some of this work themselves and save money, speed up the process, become more efficient? I’m thinking of these sort of things: basic graphics work, PDF creation, page layout, web design/maintenance. There’s no cost to download and install The Gimp, Inkscape, OpenOffice.org or Scribus. Moving a web site to a decent CMS like Joomla! from a hard-coded site (that you have to go back to your web designer every time you want content changed) could provide longer term benefits although this would require some up front cost.
• Security. Is it a big deal for most SMEs? It doesn’t crop up that much in discussion. So I don’t think it is an area to major on. Do you? Clearly there are big advantages to using OSS (Linux) on the desktop for protection from almost all malware. But with existing infrastructure protected by AV, Firewalls, filters and IDS etc, is it worth changing? For it’s own sake probably not, but as part of a bigger overhaul, probably.
• Servers and networked services. With M$’s release of Windows Server 2008^(tm), is there an opportunity to promote the OSS alternative? Again, upgrades are not going to be cheap. Current VAR expertise will be limited with the new platform so where is the downside to using OSS based servers instead? Free, secure, immensely flexible and scalable. We have just seen Alfresco announce that their Open Source ECM now fully supports Microsoft’s Sharepoint stack. The big benefit here is in keeping your businesses’ documents on an open platform. Not locked inside a proprietary M$ one where you will be forever asked to pay to get continued access to your data.

That’s it for now. If you got this far, thanks!

I’d like to think this might become a short series of posts if we can get more and better ideas from you too.

Ubuntu & webbook now available online at CPW

Good news!

When we first announced the Elonex webbook, you could only get the Ubuntu version by visiting one of Carphone Warehouse’s bricks-and-mortar shops. Online they only had the old XP version listed.

Today that has changed. Now you can order a webbook, with Ubuntu pre-installed without having to go out at all!

Alan Bell has a bit more detail and comment over on the webbook blog, but if you simply can’t wait and must go and order one right now, here’s the page. Scroll down a bit to the box that says “Compare our top 10 offers” and check out the top three.

The T-Mobile deal looks pretty good to me

IBM, Canonical/Ubuntu, Novell, Red Hat Deliver Microsoft-Free Desktops Worldwide

I was going to write a bit about this MAJOR announcement myself today; but there’s not much point.

Glyn Moody has covered most of the bases in his usual eloquent style.

I’m in complete agreement with Glyn here. This is a really big deal. Perhaps not today or tomorrow, but it is making a HUGE statement to the business community at large that there are credible alternatives to M$, and, with IBM’s help they can choose from Novell, Red Hat or Canonical for their desktop IT.

Of course, we [ the enlightened ones ] have known this for sometime. But the dark-grey-suit brigade didn’t really have a clue. They simply believed what they were told.

Now they are being told something new.