Filed under: Ask Matt
This one covers how open source creates ownership, the importance of community to WordPress, the role of BuddyPress in social media, open source and government, and the infectious nature of the open source mindset. Hope you guys enjoy!
GigaOM Pro is a new subscription research site from my friends on the GigaOM crew. It’s also the first major media site I know about powered by BuddyPress and it’ll be interesting to see how the social features influence the sites evolution. Here’s Mark Jaquith’s post about building it.
Happy to announce that BuddyPress is now available to the world. BuddyPress is a package built on top of WordPress which transforms WP into a social network complete with profiles, friends, messaging, groups, and even activity streams. Of course it’s 100% GPL and Open Source. It’s built on top of MU (which can be tricky to install) so still not for everybody yet, but this is a major milestone in the WordPress world. Check it out. Congrats to Andy and the whole BuddyPress team. 
Here’s Andy’s official announcement post and WordPress.org.
The new BuddyPress site is up and includes the key ingredients of an open source project: mailing list, bug tracker, and SVN. No official release of anything yet, but if you’re interested in following the development you should join the mailing list. The site itself is, of course, powered by WordPress.