WordPress (news, site) made a small announcement today regarding whether or not the GPL applies to themes. 

WordPress refers to the GPL as their Bill of Rights, but we like to think of it as a free software license. The GPL is a popular licence that grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the free software definition, and uses copyleft to ensure the freedoms are preserved—even when the work is changed or added to.

Matt Mullenweg of WordPress writes, "We’ve always done our best to keep WordPress.org clean and only promote things that are completely compatible and legal with WordPress’s license." But just to be double sure, he recently consulted the Software Freedom Law Center for their opinion. Mullenweg's results were summed up on the WordPress blog in one simple line:

"PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required."

Of course, cutting out CSS and JavaScript from WordPress would get kind of hairy and horrible, so the final verdict from the WordPress team is that they will continue to only promote and host things on WordPress.org that are 100% GPL or compatible.

In order to recognize and celebrate a few of the folks creating 100% GPL themes as well as providing support and other services around them, WordPress has a new page listing GPL commercially supported themes here.

After allowing Acquia Search to simmer in over two hundred and fifty beta tester kitchens for a few months, Acquia (news, site) has taken the product and added it to its selection of hosted Acquia Network services.

Looks like a couple of companies are in cahoots to get video delivered straight to your mobile network, among other media.

That is, Akamai Technologies, Inc. and KIT digital, Inc. have combined forces in a strategic agreement. The agreement will allow KIT to package and resell Akamai solutions with its KIT VX Video Management Platform. Moreover, the agreement allows the companies to jointly market the KIT VX Video Management Platform to key Akamai enterprise customers.

Maybe it just seems like it, but there is sneaking suspicion that you can’t set foot outside the door at the moment without tripping over another buddying-up between Digital Reef (news, site) and a new friend.

This time it's with EntropySoft (news, site) the enterprise content integration specialist. The purpose? To provide more out-of-the-box connectivity to more enterprise content management systems.

The cat’s outta the bag—we’ve got a birthday in the house!

Yesterday JustSystems (news, site), provider of XML and information management technologies, announced that their flagship product has been around for ten whole years.

XMetal is a powerful solution for structured content authoring and collaboration. It can be used as a stand-alone solution or as an integrated application with various content management and publishing systems including EMC's Documentum, IBM's FileNet and Microsoft's SharePoint. Using industry standards including Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), XMetaL enables content creators to create, collaborate, and reuse information that can be repurposed into the languages and formats customers need.

With a little bit going on for everyone, XMetaL boasts user-friendliness and ease of use for the technically challenged as well as powerful features for tech fanboys and fangirls.

"XMetaL has been one of the industry's top choices for the last ten years because customers can easily achieve a measurable return on investment as a result of their XMetaL implementation," said Aaron Deitcher, vice president of North America and EMEA for JustSystems.

Cut yourself a slice of cake, break out the bubbly, and learn more about XMetal here. 

A recent post on Content Management Connection's blog made a lot of sense. In it, the online community for technology practitioners, software companies and end users, discussed the need to be content first, design second.

Their point is that you wouldn't buy a suit for a stranger without first having her trying it on, so why design websites around content that doesn't exist yet. It's an interesting concept, but not as simple as it sounds.

While it's true that when projects are started and designers are tasked with putting together comps of possible designs, the actual content for a site is usually just a gleam in the project manager's eye. Rarely do design projects start with the final copy. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

The announcement that Kapow Technologies (news, site) has just put the latest version of its Web Data Server — better known as its  Mashup Server — on general release should be of interest to anyone who is looking at their Web 2.0 apps for cost savings.

While a lot of companies claim a lot of things about their products, Kapow Technologies' financial success and growth over the past two years has backed up those claims principally as a result of some very serious software.

With the v7.0 release Mashup Server boasts enhanced scalability and performance — and there are few other interesting bonuses as well.

Call it rubber-necking or whatever you want, but when one company buys another company in this business we want to know the details.

Such is the case with the announcement that Pennsylvania based Really Strategies (news, site) has just bought out DocZone (news, site), a Dutch-based SaaS XML content management provider under — you guessed it — undisclosed terms.

The Joomla Web CMS project — as many of you well know — is based on the GNU General Public License (GPL). This means, among other things, that the Joomla project generally has an ethos of encouraging collaboration, community and free software.

The Joomla team confirmed in 2007 that both Joomla v1.0 and v1.5 were released under the GPL license. Now, the Joomla folks have taken things one step further.

Let's take another trip to the cloud, shall we? Yes, the adage may be old: to cloud or not to cloud? The open source Enterprise CMS vendor Nuxeo (news, site) solved this poetic dilemma and took its document management product to the cloud.

Installing everything needed for a CMS can be quite daunting, so it comes as welcome news that eZ (news, site) has developed an all-in-one installer for those just starting out or switching in the open source CMS world.

Expansion, expansion, expansion. There are tons of ways companies can achieve it, but TeamViewer’s most recent method of choice is of the multilingual variety.

The desktop sharing software, which was already available in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Dutch, and Danish, has added six new languages to the family: Turkish, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Polish and Japanese.

We saw productivity suite provider, Zoho (news, site), attempt to get social with it earlier this year when they released their multi-platform chat program. And then again when they released embeddable gadgets for their applications.

So what makes this time different? Well, instead of a simple gadget or two, Zoho’s kicking out Zoho Projects 2.0. The latest version of their online project management and team collaboration solution is backed by a host of social features that Zoho promises will change how teams get work done. 

WoodWing (news, site) released two updated versions of its language-improving Smart Speller and Smart Hyphen plug-ins for Adobe's Creative Suite 4.

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• FriendFeed Offers Up File Sharing
• New Zealand Mobile Facebook up 700% in Last Five Months
• Flickr Finally Embraces Twitter, Challenges TwitPic
• Small Brands Can Have Facebook Vanity URLs Also

With the advent of Software as a Service (Saas), it's surprising that more browser-based options for web development don't exist. Which is what makes Platformic (news, site) so unique. Not only does it offer a browser-based web development strategy, its platform combines web design with content management.

Recently we spoke with Mark Underhill, Chief Technology Officer at Platformic about their many innovative features. The essence of Platformic 3.0 is that it lets designers, developers and laypeople use the same tools to make exciting designs, offer new media and dynamic content to users who demand it.

With all the talk of new solutions, new technologies and new versions of technologies, it would be hard to imagine that a considerable number of companies are still having problems with the basics of digital asset management (DAM).

That would appear to be one of the primary conclusions of a new report released by the Aberdeen Group (news, site) for Widen, a provider of web-based digital asset management applications. The report says that only half of Best-in-Class organizations (53%) indicated they currently have searchable access to content.

In August of last year, the CNW Group, a provider of news and information distribution services for communication professionals, launched their social media release, the evolution of their multi-media release which includes print, audio, video and Internet and a little more.

Now they go another step in supporting the needs of communication professionals with the release of the CNW MediaRoom, an externally hosted website that integrates into a company's website, providing the ability to quickly and easily provide communications like press and social media releases.

Open source enterprise content management vendor Alfresco (news, site) really doesn't strike you as a vendor that likes to stay in the shadows. Quite the contrary actually. And the work they have been doing on CMIS — the Content Management Interoperability Specification — proves it. Their goal — and they aren't being subtle about it — is to the first Enterprise CMS that is fully CMIS compliant.

KnowledgeTree (news, site) is officially spreading its wings (limbs?). The open source document management software company today announced the grand opening of its North American headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The company has made other recent moves to ensure its future, including their edition of electronic signatures in the KnowledgeTree 3.6.1 release. The company, which is funded by Hasso Plattner Ventures, has already gained s worldwide traction, and is now reportedly focusing on building its US operations.

North American operations will be led by Tim Spink, who joins the organization as vice president of sales. His experience includes former senior director at rPath Inc., former vice president of sales at Solarwinds Inc., and various sales management and director positions at Red Hat Inc.

“We have been experiencing incredible momentum at KnowledgeTree,” said Daniel Chalef, CEO. “Establishing a North American headquarters was the next logical step and we are pleased to have an industry veteran like Tim join our team.”