Alex Sirota, who I know through another WP support group, just posted about initiatives that might more successfully sustain open-source development over the long run.
Towards a Sustainable Funding Model for WordPress
https://newpathconsulting.com/2024/09/towards-a-sustainable-funding-model-for-wordpress
The WordPress open-source project is facing a growing pain. Despite its massive 40%+ market share, the project’s volunteer base is feeling the strain, and major contributors like Automattic aren’t getting support from other major vendors in the community. This has led to a sense of uneasiness in the community, raising questions about the project’s future and sustainability.
Being in this position after 20+ years of WordPress gaining over 40% market share is very surprising and frustrating for the community. While WordPress has relied on the generosity of volunteers and a few larger companies for years, the increasing complexity of the project demands a more robust sustainability solution. It’s time to explore alternative funding models that ensure adequate resources for future innovation.
An attempt at a new WorPress governance model was attemepted but died on the vine. This is really hard work. At least two questions remain yet to be fully addressed:
How do volunteers and employees at for-profit and not-for-profit organizations get adequately incentivized?
What incentives can be used to align individual and organizational interests and ambitions?
Bottom line isn't so much about vulture capitalists free riding open source. Instead it's about the need to make open-source contributions more sustainable over the long run.
Mullenweg seems to be attempting to solve the “Large private companies leeching off of open source without contributing as much” problem by himself. Nobody has been able to solve it yet.
That said, WPE going ‘litigious’ like Oracle and sending cease and desist letters and ‘lawyering up’ instead of solving this dispute among the open source community with some drama shows the dangers of private equity firms. Sociopathic US style business is what they do, and it didnt take weeks for WPE to go down that route after having been taken over by one. I’d worry if I was using any plugin that was bought by WPE. Private equity firms dont litigate only to defend.
The other side of the coin is: if WordPress as a foundation is asking for more support it needs to function transparently and be driven by the community. You can’t go out and force others to commit money and time and then provide them with no mechanisms to help define the roadmap. Matt’s big push right now is real-time collaboration in the block editor. Has anyone asked for this? Meanwhile, the navigation block has been functionally broken for how many releases now?
I would be willing to invest time and money, but only if the roadmap is being driven by the community and not Matt.
Edit to add some context: Since 2018 (and the introduction of the block editor), there has been 17 releases. Matt has been the release lead 12 times. Automattic employees have been a release lead 15 times. Two outside people have been release lead in the last 6 years. Ironically, this is also the timeframe that Matt is complaining about for lack of community involvement.
6.7: Matt Mullenweg
6.6: Matt Mullenweg
6.5: Matt Mullenweg
6.4: Josepha Haden Chomphosy (Automattic)
6.3: Matías Ventura (Automattic)
6.2: Matt Mullenweg
6.1: Matt Mullenweg
6.0 Matt Mullenweg
5.9: Jb Audras (Whodunit)
5.8: Jonathan Desrosiers (Bluehost)
5.7: Matt Mullenweg
5.6: Josepha Haden (Automattic)
5.5: Matt Mullenweg
5.4: Matt Mullenweg
5.3: Matt Mullenweg
5.2: Matt Mullenweg
5.1: Matt Mullenweg
5.0: Matt Mullenweg
Is there evidence that the money he was asking for was for the non-profit side?
The WP Community Collective supports and funds individual contribution and community-based initiatives for the open-source WordPress project. [https://www.thewpcommunitycollective.com/](https://www.thewpcommunitycollective.com/)
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The author of that post doesn’t seem to be aware of what is going on with WordPress.
There doesn’t appear to be a funding problem, but people and control problem.
For example, the WordPress Security team has failed to address security issues for years, [like this one](https://www.pluginvulnerabilities.com/2024/08/26/wordpress-documentation-doesnt-warn-about-security-risk-of-maybe_unserialize/), but the [team’s page](https://make.wordpress.org/security/) doesn’t have any information on how people could get involved. The team running the plugin directory blocked anyone from even applying to join the team for years, despite their continued inability to properly address security problems. The last time we tried to work with them to address some of the continuing problems, we were met with a bunch of lies. Including claiming that people being paid to work on the team were volunteers.
Or look at what happened with the Marketing team, which was shut down and replaced with an Automattic run Media Corp team. Before that, the Marketing team was not allowed to do a lot of the marketing work. Only Automattic employees could do it.
As was mentioned in another comment, Matt Mullenweg and his companies’ employees (both Automattic and Audrey), are largely in control of things now. So the problem isn’t that Automattic isn’t getting support, it is that is blocking others from meaningful participation.
Also, the governance effort didn’t die because it is hard, it died because Matt Mullenweg wants to keep control.
Let’s be clear, most of the changes made since WordPress 5.0 were related to the controversial block editor.
Do we have a better experience for the media gallery? Nope. Better post-to-post relationships? Nope. Improvements for the Metafield API? Not this time.
And there’s still no API for admin notifications. And yes, we still need to reinvent a wheel to have an option page in WP Admin.
Even ClassicPress supported by a few developers is evolving in a much faster pace.
Well going all Elon isn’t the right way. (Only history will tell) Open source does need funding. No matter where. FOSS is being utilized in many many for-profit software offerings. Nothing new. Those contributors need more than just a thank you. See the ssh vuln debacle.
Edit: I should add that the article OP linked is well written and highlights the problem of all FOSS and does require some serious thought.
Back to the “abuse” – Matt has done this himself! His advancements in the industry and the contributions to WP were only driven by his need to try to make wordpress.com profitable since the experiments have lost marketshare (its now around 40%, but i could swear this used to be much higher before – got no data though) to other services that while not being as feature rich had better user experience. Back to FOSS. If we wanted to ensure the software follows a community-lead path he wouldn’t have forced these tool onto the community but kept them as extensions of the software. Just like every other plugin! Same for his recent acquisitions or the rather odd interpretation of jetpack re business.
I believe that the recent open opinions on WordPress failure to update the fundamentals (basic backend experience IMHO) stirred this up sooner than later. In order to do that he wants money, just not his money! Profit margin might be too low….
Thats one reason the Classic Press Foundation exists. Because of exactly this type of misguided focus. Yes, software must advance, yes, new tool and methods are required, but not at the expense of the community and those who have been contributing and helped to grow the adoption rate at such impressive rates. It wasn’t Automattic – it was developers, web designers and even the advanced DIY crowd. The companies latest push to “democratize” is exactly what VC/PE firms do. It’s the same playbook!
While Im not a fanboy (and they have their issues) at least WPE keeps improving their software in IMHO better ways than them. At least they kept their promise when they bought ACF. But thats just my opinion.
So whats for lunch…?
i run a small team of developers, what would be the most effective way to contribute to WordPress? We dont have time for massive time commitment but could there be smaller ways to give back?
If there was a funding problem there wouldn’t be for profit arms of the platforms. Open source CMS platforms are a freaking scam. They’re all gateways to for profit models driven by Automattic and Acquia.
I wonder if this should be looked the other way around. The problem is that WP is too obsessed with money. Once WP started making decisions to compete with commerical offerings and grow market share in the same way monopolies seek to grow theirs it has gone downhill. Once you have the wrong targets in mind, everything gets poisoned. What’s the point in contributing to something so that a bunch of companies can charge more off the work of a community? That is true wether it is Automattic or WPengine or some other outfit. It doesn’t really matter how much these companies pump back into WP, it no longer is the same social project when decisions are made to protect business interests rather than just to make a piece of software more awesome.
I stopped using WP altogether and everytime I think of starting up a new site I think, as a dev I don’t have the appetite to spend my time building with overly complicated tooling designed by another soulless corporation, install a million subscription based plugins to get the basic functionality going and then spend money to have some other company do the stuff I really don’t want to do (fend off against spammers and exploits etc). Somewhere the idea of giving users the most awesome OS for building websites got lost. Because if it wasn’t lost, we’d be looking at making things easier and more accessible, not harder and more expensive. But that’s the stuff these businesses charge for.
Right now the only thing that I find potentially exciting is the ability to run WP off a sqlite db without the need for a server running php/mysql etc. That stuff removes barriers rather than putting more up.
If only WordPress Foundation had a trademark that could be licensed for free money 🤷♂️
Maybe even $32 million a year from one mob. That could hire a handful of developers.
Automattic’s woocommerce is the spammiest trash on the planet. A mountain of recurring subscriptions for basic functionality.
Automattic is a greedy, greedy company that’ll never, ever get another dollar from me.