social – Rich Sharples' Weblog

I’ve been a happy, occasional WordPress user since 2008 – this blog is hosted by Automattic – I pay them money even though there are cheaper ways to host a low-volume WP site. I’ve even had the pleasure of meeting Matt Mullenweg a couple of times over the years. I’ve seen WordPress the product and community grow to the point where it’s become the de-facto content management system for the modern web – powering 478 million site – 43% of the web.

The WordPress community has recently been thrust into the spotlight due to a public disagreement between the two major players: Automattic, led by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, and WP Engine, a popular WordPress hosting provider.

At the heart of the dispute are questions about contributions to the WordPress ecosystem, trademark usage, and the balance between commercial interests and open-source principles. Automattic has raised concerns about WP Engine’s level of contribution to WordPress development, while WP Engine maintains that its contributions are substantial and in line with industry norms.

The situation has escalated to legal actions, with both parties sending cease-and-desist letters and WP Engine filing a lawsuit against Automattic and Mullenweg. This conflict has led to technical disruptions, internal restructuring at Automattic (Matt offered employees a decent severance package to leave if they disagreed with his position), and broader discussions about governance in the WordPress community.

As the dispute unfolds, it highlights the complex relationships within open-source ecosystems, where commercial entities both benefit from and contribute to shared resources. The outcome of this situation may have far-reaching implications for how open-source projects, particularly WordPress, navigate the balance between community collaboration and commercial interests in the future.

For the record – I don’t like open source freeloading – especially when it’s large well funded organizations doing the exploitation. Open Source collaboration depends on a certain degree of fairness – contributors take out more than they put in and it’s a fine balance that’s easily disrupted should someone decide to not give at all.

That said – I think Matt Mullenweg / Automattic could and should have handled this much better. If you are the dominant force in a community (as Automattic is in the WordPress community) and can’t defend yourself from freeloaders – you are doing something very wrong. If you control the code – there are thousands of tweaks you can make to the release model, cadence, APIs, to advantage you and disadvantage others. We lived this every day at Red Hat – it can be done without cease and desist notices, laying off employees who disagree with you and fracturing the community.

Yesterday’s decoder episode is an interview with Eugen Rochko, the author and BDFL of Mastadon – the crowd-funded, open source decentralized social network that many Twitter users are moving to (myself included).

At its core, it’s a pretty standard story of an open source project disrupting a multi-billion dollar market with large, well-funded incumbents. The wrinkle in this story is that the primary incumbent is struggling to align to a massive overvaluation and is run by the world’s richest person – Elon Musk.

The next chapter of the Mastodon story is about commercial sustainability as it scales. I’m assuming that there will be new rounds of growth fueled by Elon Musk’s efforts to monetize the huge Twitter install base. The impending blue check mark sign-up deadline will likely cause another Twitter diaspora, and Twitter seems to be in a tailspin.

Rochko and the Mastodon ecosystem face some challenges – on the one hand, they have to ensure no single vendor dominates the fediverse. Conversely, the BDFL model provides the focus and direction many open source projects lack. And typically – a BDFL model requires a dominant vendor to guide the development and roadmap to fit the market need. Without a balanced ecosystem, we’re back to where we are today.

The challenge for incumbents is whether they can afford to ignore the unifying standards behind the fediverse (e.g., ActivityPub) and whether they have enough user affinity to avoid users taking their content and social graphs elsewhere.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out.

I’ve been playing with Mastadon for a while, and you can follow me here: https://techhub.social/@RichSharples