Thanks to Bob Kings Com­ment Rat­ings plu­gin, all datadirt read­ers can now like or dis­like any com­ment: just use the new thumbs-up / thumbs-down icons — should be pretty self-explanatory.

Is it legally and/or eth­i­cally okay, to build a busi­ness based on a GPL licensed soft­ware? To those of you unfa­mil­iar with the not-so-uncomplicated details of open and com­mer­cial licens­ing, this ques­tion may sound like a ques­tion you’d ask a stu­dent of media law. But the­ory turns into vir­tual real­ity when we take a closer look a The­sis, a very pop­u­lar Word­Press theme.

Unlike most themes, The­sis isn’t avail­able for free. Christ Pear­son is sell­ing his tem­plate for $87 per per­sonal site, and so he’s been rack­ing up sales. Why do peo­ple pay for The­sis when there are so many free themes avail­able? This ques­tion is a lot eas­ier to answer: Chris thought about what pro cus­tomers want and started to offer a flex­i­ble, highly con­fig­urable theme which caters almost every need of pro­fes­sional pub­lish­ers and pro-bloggers. But even though his sales fig­ures are sky­rock­et­ing, Matt Mul­len­weg, founder and head of WordPress.com/.org argues that The­sis vio­lates the GPL license — because GPL-software not only is freely avail­able (in source code), but the GPL (Gnu Pub­lic Licenses) also states that all prod­ucts built upon GPL soft­ware must also use the same license. In other words: It’s ille­gal to make money on the hard (and free) work of others.

Today mixergy.com invited Chris and Matt for a Skype dis­cus­sion which cov­ers some very impor­tant aspects of soft­ware licensing:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Today the Word­Press team released the long-awaited ver­sioni 3.0 — it comes packed with new fea­tures and a new stan­dard theme.

Word­Press 3.0 comes with a suprise: no more JPEG sup­port due to high license cost, but luck­ily SVG will replace the legacy format.

Word­Press is just get­ting bet­ter and bet­ter: 2 new plu­g­ins imple­ment social net­work­ing fea­tures. So finally, every reg­is­tered user can write sta­tus updates and gets their own pro­file page. In this post­ing I dis­cuss the advan­tages of social media fea­tures for niche blogs and explain how to install either BP or Mingle.

Word­Press 2.9.1 fixes a cou­ple of sched­ul­ing issues — plus there’s a hack for mak­ing Sim­ple Tags work with Word­Press 2.9.1

I’ve been invited to join the World Blog­ging Forum 2009 in Bucharest as a VIP guest — and I’m really look­ing for­ward to meet­ing incred­i­ble web geeks from 30 coun­tries. Head­ing for Roma­nia next week and of course I’ll report about the event, here’s a short pre­view of the guest list and the topics.

Yes­ter­day the Word­Press Team released the offi­cial roadmap ver­sion 2.8, named after Jazz musi­cian Chet Baker. Thanks to the update engine most web­mas­ters should be able to do the update via CMS — but of course it’s always a good idea to start with a com­plete Back­ups. The High­lights of the new ver­sion are the improved wid­get– and template-interfaces, plus there’s syn­tax high­light­ing for edit­ing tem­plates via the backend.

Con­tenture reverses the clas­si­cal online adver­tis­ing model by offer­ing users ad-free sites and enabling web­mas­ter to build Freemium con­tent busi­ness mod­els. Very inter­est­ing launch — I just registered.

Wid­getized side­bars come with extra-comfort and a nifty drag-and-drop bonus, but things tend to get com­pli­cated when you want to use the same wid­get in more than one side­bare. But fear not, plug-in help is available.

Finally, the new tem­plate is fin­ished. So please let me know what you think of it!