If It’s Free, There Must Be a Catch!
Aaron Brazell writes about the upcoming release of version 2.1 of WordPress.
Testing has been given serious effort with the release of WordPress.com hosted blogs. You just thought you were getting a free no fuss, no muss blog built on WordPress but what you little guinea pigs may not have known was that it has been the testing bed of most of the WordPress development code. It gives developers a real-time, real-life window into what works and what doesn’t and allows for extensive non-technical testing. Both WordPress 1.5 and 2.0 were plagued with bugs that were not thoroughly vetted out prior to release. While WordPress.com does not guarantee a bug-free release, the chances and scope of bugs are significantly reduced.
And you thought WordPress was free because they loved us bloggers.
Of course, it’s a given that there’s really no such thing as a free lunch. If someone gives you something without asking for monetary compensation, then chances are you’ll still be giving something in return one way or another.
And in this case, I think the feedback that the WordPress team was able to gather, as well as the development testing, are probably be more valuable than a few dollars or cents per user had they opted to charge for WP as a subscription service. (Some software companies pay employees to do product testing!) . Hey, someday, if and when (which we think is more of an “when”) WordPress gets acquired by some biggie company they’ll get the bajillions of dollars that they deserve for creating such a cool blogging platform. How’s that for a hefty return?
At any rate, I hear many of the issues with the older WP versions have been solved by 2.1. We now have auto-save, for instance, which I think is excellent, given the numerous times I’ve pulled my hair over posts that were lost due to connectivity problems, browsers crashing and even power failures. And then there are the speed and reliability improvements, which are always good. 2.1 is a new line separate from the 2.0 series, though, so some plugins and hacks might be incompatible.
Kudos to the WordPress team for this release. I hope we can upgrade soon.
What do you think?