I’m heading to my first WordCamp event today in Chicago!

The show schedule for Saturday and Sunday will cover all sorts of goodies from experienced WordPress bloggers, developers, designers and of course, the founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg.

It’s nice how they’ve setup the website to display all the folks attending.  I’m looking forward to meeting @RachelBaker and @BrianGardner in person plus a ton of other interesting people I’ve seen on Twitter, in the WordPress world and who are just uber geeks!

You can follow events on Twitter search for #wcchicago

WordPress gives people a voice

I feel much more passionate about WordPress than Joomla because the founder’s vision is about giving people a voice and keeping it real on Open Source/GPL.  Alister Cameron wrote that Matt Mullenweg “gets” open source,

In a conversation that went for the better part of half an hour, we discussed the ins and outs of the GPL, of the relationship between WordPress(.org) and Automattic… and Matt, personally. All of which game me a lot of clarity, I think.

I think at the end of the day, the GPL is not in debate. It’s simply not a controversial issue!

After my long and fruitful chat with the Automattic staffer yesterday I think I have clarity: the issue is not that the GPL is too restrictive or that Matt is being unreasonable. The issue is that most of us have not thought creatively enough about how to both honour the GPL and make money.

Best to illustrate this is to look at what’s happened with Brian Gardner. Now, I have reason to believe Brian is second-to-none for having made really really really (are you getting the emphasis?!) good money out of his premium themes. Yet, he’s switched to an open-source model, and his flagship Revolution theme is now released under a GPL-ish license (not that there is a license file in the ZIPs you download, but we’ll assume it’s GPL).

I found Alister’s post very interesting in that he evaluated why people were complaining about the WordPress theme directory only offering open source/GPL free themes vs paid ones and what people could do about it.  He then took it a step further and talked about someone who was doing it right.  I shared in the comments how breeding show dogs isn’t a money making venture but that dog breeders could generate revenue with training, speaking, writing books and being a visible expert within their AKC breed as an analogy for CMS theme developers.

WordPress blows my mind.  It has empowered people to dream and then turn those dreams into working realities.  Inside the world of WordPress, people have created new business models.

I can’t wait to meet, greet, and Tweet on WordPress blogging!