Houston, near Texas - March 30 2009.
Automattic, the company behind Akismet and WordPress took the tech-no-sphere by surprise today with the announcement of the shock acquisition of the Habari blogging platform.Lord Matt Mullenweg (CEO of Automattic) explained the rationale for the move:
'There's a lot of synergy between the two blogging platforms. For a while now, we have been aware of increasing discontent from WP users with the complexity of the WordPress administration dashboard. Similarly, our large and loyal developer community are frustrated with the lack of extensibility of the plugin architecture and our 5 character indent coding standards.'
'We hope to merge elements of the minimalist, monochrome, stylish dashboard and integrate the best features of the Habari core to make WordPress 3.0 the leading open source blogging platform.'
Ironically, Habari was originally created back in January 2006 by disillusioned WordPress developers and it remains to be seen whether leading Habari figures will accept a place on the Auttomatic Web site and be forced to contribute an amusing profile picture and a witty mini-bio.
Sources embedded deep within the Habari meritocracy were furious at the move.
'The Habari community are aghast at the decision to sell out and get into bed with Matt. We were so close to releasing version 0.6 and finally conquering the world. This move smacks of bribery and deliberate sabotage. Most members of the Cabal are fiercely against the move and we intend to 'fork off' and start up another blogging engine using the latest technologies. Tomorrow.'
The shock move took the blogging community completely by surprise although an anonymous Valleywag source claimed the reason for the acquisition was more obvious
'WordPress aren't interested in any of the Habari features or the Monolith interface. They simply want Owen Winkler to do all the voiceovers on all the WordPress screencasts with that deep, booming authoritative voice. Oh and Ryan likes the pony.
[Update: Apologies to Scott Merrill who is the true owner of the 'deep, booming authoritative voice' but you really need the Habari 'comment-narration' plugin enabled for the full, glorious effect]
This is satire, right?
Right...?
No, no. It's all completely true.
Finally we'll all be able to afford our own ponies!
I think you might have posted this two days early by accident Andy.
*yawn*
Nice parody of the Rails/Merb merge thats got announced recently.
April fools - lame
Early April fools - doubly lame
Two days early = attention seeking fail.
Are non-Cabal shareholders affected by the acquisition?
You know, Habari has the ponies but ma.tt has the monies.
I DEMAND an update to this post to correctly identify ME as the owner of the deep, booming authoritative voice.
Let the embedded Cabal sources speak for themselves. If I am offered stock, I am sold. Maybe even literally :P
What they don't realize is that it's actually Skippy's sexy, sexy voice that gets us all the action.
Factually, almost completely correct, except the voiceovers are done by Scott Merrill.
Does Habari have a scheduled posting feature? ;)
This is a joke, right?
I really like the footer! :-) (hoping that the whole post is really a joke)
You took out my URL!
Oh, by the way, Caius, if you're serious, you really need to remove your ruby blinkers every now and then :)