(This post should be read while listening to Wish by Joshua Redman. The writing is synchronized to the music reading speed.)
Contributor day just wrapped up for Portland for WordCamp US. If you ever have a chance to visit a WordCamp, I recommend it. It’s an amazing group of people brought together by this crazy idea that by working together regardless of our differences or where we came from or what school we went to we can be united by a simple yet groundbreaking idea: that software can give you more Freedom. Freedom to hack, freedom to charge, freedom to break it, freedom to do things I disagree with, freedom to experiment, freedom to be yourself, freedom expressed across the entire range of the human condition.
Open Source, once ridiculed and attacked by the professional classes, has taken over as an intellectual and moral movement. Its followers are legion within every major tech company. Yet, even now, false prophets like Meta are trying to co-opt it. Llama, its “open source” AI model, is free to use—at least until “monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month.” Seriously.
Excuse me? Is that registered users? Visitors to WordPress-powered sites? (Which number in the billions.) That’s like if the US Government said you had freedom of speech until you made over 50 grand in the preceding calendar year, at which point your First Amendment rights were revoked. No! That’s not Open Source. That’s not freedom.
I believe Meta should have the right to set their terms—they’re smart business, and an amazing deal for users of Llama—but don’t pretend Llama is Open Source when it doesn’t actually increase humanity’s freedom. It’s a proprietary license, issued at Meta’s discretion and whim. If you use it, you’re effectively a vassal state of Meta.
When corporations disingenuously claim to be “open source” for marketing purposes, it’s a clear sign that Open Source is winning.
Actual Open Source licenses are the law that guarantees freedom, the bulwark against authoritarianism. But what makes Open Source work isn’t the law, it’s the ethos. It’s the social mores. It’s what I’m now calling Ecosystem Thinking: the mindset that separates any old software with an open source license from the software that’s alive, that’s humming with activity and contributions from a thousand places.
Ecosystem Thinking has four parts:
- Learn
- Evolve
- Teach
- Nourish
Learn is about keeping ourselves in a beginner’s mind, the curiosity to always engage with new ideas and approaches.
Evolve is where we apply those learnings to our next iteration, our next version. We see how things work in the real world: it’s the natural selection of actual usage.
Teach is actually where we learn even more, because you don’t really know something until you teach it. We open source our knowledge by sharing what we’ve learned, so others can follow on the same path.
Nourish is the trickiest, and most important part: it’s where we water the garden. If you’ve done the previous three steps, you’ve been very successful; now your responsibility is to spread the fruits of your labors around the ecosystem so that everyone can succeed together. This is the philosophy behind Five For the Future, which you’re going to see us emphasize a lot more now.
That’s the ecosystem. But if it’s the yin, what’s the yang? This openness and generosity will attract parasitic entities that just want to feed off the host without giving anything back. There are companies that participate in the Learn/Evolve/Teach/Nourish loop like a FernGully rainforest, and there are those who treat Open Source simply as a resource to extract from its natural surroundings, like oil from the ground.
Compare the Five For the Future pages from Automattic and WP Engine, two companies that are roughly the same size with revenue in the ballpark of half a billion. These pledges are just a proxy and aren’t perfectly accurate, but as I write this, Automattic has 3,786 hours per week (not even counting me!), and WP Engine has 47 hours. WP Engine has good people, some of whom are listed on that page, but the company is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102 billion in assets under management. Silver Lake doesn’t give a dang about your Open Source ideals. It just wants a return on capital.
So it’s at this point that I ask everyone in the WordPress community to vote with your wallet. Who are you giving your money to? Someone who’s going to nourish the ecosystem, or someone who’s going to frack every bit of value out of it until it withers? Newfold, especially since its acquisition of Yoast and Yith, gives back. (I’ve asked them to consolidate their Five for the Future pages to better represent the breadth of their contributions.) So does Awesome Motive, 10up, Godaddy, Hostinger, even Google. Think about that next time it comes up to renew your hosting or domain, weigh your dollars towards companies that give back more, because you’ll get back more, too. Freedom isn’t free.
Those of us who are makers, who create the source, need to be wary of those who would take our creations and squeeze out the juice. They’re grifters who will hop onto the next fad, but we’re trying to build something big here, something long term—something that lasts for generations.
I may screw up along the way, or my health may falter, but these principles and beliefs will stand strong, because they represent the core tenet of our community: the idea that what we create together is bigger than any one person.
(Hat tip to Automattician Jordan Hillier for the great ecosystem image.)
All fine to ask us voting with our wallet. But how can a not-inside-the-community WordPress user know which company does impactful contributions? The 5FTF page of WordPress.org? Well; that link is hidden in the footer and probably the majority on non-community users doesn’t even visit wordpress.org.
Even the mentioned companies in your blog post are not mentioning their contributions very open on their websites. Only 10up. And Bluehost mentioned it on their homepage (“recommended by”). I like that. The thing is: WP doesn’t offer any (well known) program or label that those contributors can use to create that attention. If that was the case, maybe the “others” will move.
I think we need to make it a lot more prominent, like a badge like TrustPilot, and then educate consumers through WordCamps and our press to look for those companies. Basically community marketing. It’s easier than normal marketing because it’s appealing to a higher ideal.
Like that idea of a badge. Only the group that comes to WordCamps/Meetups and read (english) WordPress post is a tiny fraction of the WP user base. The wild idea i had was to bring that deserved attention to a place where “every” WP user will see it; that’s the dashboard. (in a subtle way) Think of a credit system that companies can use to target countries. I know, too wild of an idea. Anyway, impactful contributors must be more proud on their work and shout if out on their website. If that’s with an “official” badge; even better.
This area will start to help break down those granular details.
https://make.wordpress.org/project/2024/09/12/wordpress-contribution-health-dashboards-an-experiment/
There are also a slew of details that we hope later to credit but are not yet able to be parsed. For example, GoDaddy empowered me to work on WCUS Contributor Day. I have spent months of work time on leading up to yesterday. The data here shows nothing of that, yet.
I hope to get a roadmap of the milestones organized in a few weeks, highlighting would be needed to expand upon this.
Thank you Matt for sharing this. Didn’t know about the Meta license restrictions indeed very weird.
I appreciate your leadership and encouragement for everyone to participate in contributing. This is critical for a healthy ecosystem. Also really liked how clearly you outlined the 4 parts.
Looking forward to seeing you at WCUS.
Thanks for writing this. I really like the idea of the infinite loop of Learn, Evolve, Teach, Nourish.
I do worry about the commons and sometimes a lack of deeper hive thinking about not just what an open source project needs but also its norms, etiquettes and culture.
For me an open knowledge systems (open web) is more important than open-source, and similarly open source more important than WordPress.
At this point of time in my life, WordPress just feels like a large enough canvass and really powerful vehicle for spreading the influence of not just using the commons but also producing it.
I came across this book a couple of months ago called “Knowledge as Commons” by Prabir Purkayasta – (https://www.google.com/search?q=Knowlege+as+Commons+Prabir+Purkayasta) and it resonated a lot with me as a person from the global south. While a lot of the writing is more along the lines of open licensing around medicines, GM agriculture tech, vaccines, hardware and of course software.
The main thread that came across was that the only way to safeguard against the “Tragedy of Commons” or insurance against only extraction based entities would be to not just increase the users of a technology / commons but also increase and encourage them to be the producers of technology / commons.
The systems within our systems that encourage this user to producer will be a great achievement.
Thanks for writing this, it is reassuring (not that I had concerns) to hear your thoughts on the WordPress ecosystem and especially the FernGully example.
Why don’t we encourage all freemium plugins, themes and patterns that use the dot org for distribution, to add an affiliate link into the products. When someone does upgrade to a paid plan – The cash can be distributed to contributors, foundation, WPCS or even – dare I say it – an independent organisation to openly disclose, how much cash came in, what went out and where it went. I think that would generate a marketing budget, go towards funding the massive hosting and upkeep of the repository and allow free plugins to also grow through more visitors being encouraged to download from the repository. There are affiliate links on the hosting recommendations, why not in the repository?
It’s always flummoxed me that WordPress the project, relies on a begging bowl system to keep it all going. Imagine, all the pressure for Automattic and a few other companies of supporting the project being taken away. Such freedom, right?
Thanks, Courtney for sharing that link to https://make.wordpress.org/project/2024/09/12/wordpress-contribution-health-dashboards-an-experiment/.
As I look through the Five For the Future pledges (and the Contribution Health Dashboards), I wonder: Has there been any effort to quantify whether or not companies are fulfilling their pledge promises?
For example, has anyone tried to quantify the hours delivered vs. pledged hours in terms of activity on wp.org/svn/some other metrics? If we’re going to say “This is a good contributor. This is a bad contributor.” it would be good to reference some actual data.