The whole “music must be free, since I can download it for free” nonsense has, by tradition, been little more than a shouting match between folks who will never listen to anyone but themselves, and the occasional person willing to debate with them (at least until they determine their opponent has no ears).

However I read a blog post today that made some really good points.

Instead of the usual “blah blah because I say it has to be this way blah blah”, Hank nicely lays out several points that are somewhat difficult to argue with. Of course I had to comment, but I feel too strongly about this topic to successfully keep myself under control. As someone who spent years making music and doing whatever possible to make a living at it, I do have strong feelings - and am only concerned about the musicians who make the music and the fans who listen. Everyone else can bugger off.

There’s a ton of bile that’s resulted from the music industry’s horrendous treatment of both the artist and consumer. I don’t think anyone would argue with that, either. However, the belief that music must exist under a free distribution model does more than get rid of the offending industry - it also removes the primary incentive for the musician to get started in the first place.

• Not every musician is 18 and dreams of living out of a tour bus 10 months out of 12.
• Not every musician is an aspiring t-shirt artist who dreams of making money on branded clothing.

NOTE: That download that was free for you? Well it most likely had an initial cost of thousands of dollars to produce. And that doesn’t include the actual time spent writing, practicing the music or time spent learning the instrument(s) the song was recorded with. Please, PLEASE stop the inane BS argument about the cost of copying being free somehow negating the fact that it still cost somebody thousands of dollars to produce.

Also, attempting to compare music and software is nonsense. Apples and bicycles, folks. That is cray-zee.

Speaking of software, the majority (if not all) open source projects are pretty much practicing the model that the crackheads are advocating for the music industry. Guess what? Nobody is making any money, or at least enough to talk about. There are an endless number of rants out there from open source developers who couldn’t believe how happy folks were to just take that software for free, and never return any sort of gratification to the folks that produced the software.

For example, one guy who is a huge fan of the crackpipe music distribution model runs his blog on WordPress. He’s making a ton of money on advertising, as well as using the popularity of his blog to generate other sources of revenue as well. I wonder if he’s ever, EVER donated anything back to Matt and the gang, who produced the software that made his blog possible?

My personal experience on several open source projects is not to expect much. Actually, don’t expect anything at all. Not only are you going to spend freaky hours writing software for free, you’re going to have to pool money together for hosting and spend even more time running around looking for donations to make it possible for your project to exist at all.

Pretty bleak, like becoming the Jerry Lewis of Cyberspace.

And there are open source projects that generate some source of revenue by selling ads on their forums or getting donations from a handful of appreciative consumers, but ultimately those generous souls represent less than 0.000001% of the people that use that software. The others happily continue to use the software, and quite a few loudly complain when the software doesn’t do exactly what they wanted. They almost never think to offer to help, or chip in to make it possible for someone to help them get what they want.

But I digress.

Something tells me that the same model for music would be a devastating blow to an art form that already suffers from the creators being in a very difficult place for survival.

A true musician, at least in my book, is one whose primary focus is their art - making music. Not performing, not branded toilet paper, not constant gigging. Making music. And for a huge number of them, that is the only thing that truly matters to them.

Saying music must be free removes the artists from the art. Or it will have that effect, eventually.

I had a blast there, and really enjoyed the energy and enthusiasm. Joomla has had a pretty rough existence, and it was a pleasure to be around such optimistic people

The initial blurb can be found here. Expect more articles as time permits.

There was a LOT of great learning from this project, and we intend to document as much of that learning as possible as articles at the main site.

It was only a matter of time before the new look was chosen, and we’re sticking with our pick of the Aurora template from the JoomlaJunkie Template Club. The guys have always been nice and helpful, with some pretty promising design.

We chose Aurora because we can make it look how we want easily, and can also port it to make the blog, which happens to be powered by Wordpress, also look consistent to the Joomla powered main site.

We’re hoping to get the integration and setup done this week, so we can spend next week with focus on the new mitchitized site.

We got some pretty interesting announcements and articles coming soon as well, so this blog should be a consistently interesting read for a while, now that the vacation is over…

I love the presentation style, and am sad I wasn’t present to see Aarron’s talk in person.

In a nutshell, they make PDF copies of the book available as it is being written, and when it is finished they will ship you a paper copy of the final edition in the mail.

If you’re into Rails, or wanting to, you need to take advantage of this fantastic program, for this fantastic book. This is basically the seminal work for folks new to Rails. Penned by Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson and a cast of thousands, this book walks you through the whole history of why Rails was created in the first place, why the approach taken was chosen, and how to actually use the environment to your best advantage.

As well this book has an awesome style and is very accessible and easy to read. Good reading even if you don’t bother to actually work with Rails, as there is a lot of useful information in here for the software developer.

Oracle has recently released an updated InnoDB driver for MySQL, which has some pretty interesting features beyond the basic obvious-must-haves-for-clean-data features. As Alexey Kovyrin writes:

These interesting performance results obviously come from the fact that in addition to index pages compression (by default it is trying to compress 16kb pages down to 8kb) new innodb plugin performs TEXT/BLOB/VARCHAR fields compression off-page so every large TEXT field could become as small as a few bytes if its compression ratio is good. One thing I’d like to mention here that in our case we’ve actually tried a few possible options for compressed page sizes: 1k, 4k and 8k. Results were not so different because most of our data was in TEXT fields and there weren’t many other indexes aside from PRIMARY, but for some other cases it could make sense to try other page sizes (not default 8k) to make data set smaller.

Think about that for a second. If you’re chugging around a big fat database and have random reads on tables that have BLOB columns then you’re in for a big treat.

Although we loved the blog, and still love the engine that powered it (Typo), a decision has been made to use PHP tools for all of the SML websites exclusively from this point forward.

The Rails stuff will be used exclusively for all of the upcoming mitchitized sites, as well as several additional projects that have not been announced.

(We haven’t announced them yet, as we’ve been too busy blowing up the SML Blog.)

Rest assured the content and comments from the blog have been saved (thank you Postgresql!) and will resurface when we decide what the new PHP-based blog engine will be, and how it will be implemented.

As there are a ton of side projects coming up, we’re going to be very un-web-developer-like and resist the temptation to write a whole new blogging engine from scratch. Other than a decent layout this should be rather quick.

Again, apologies for the downtime (Mom seems to be the only person that has noticed so we don’t think it should be too big of a deal) and feel free to check back later.

Um, that is all.