About Matt Mullenweg WordCamp US & Ecosystem Thinking

Matt published this post in his blog on 2024-09-17, and these are my ideas.

But first, some context. I’m Francesco. I worked at Automattic for three years and have been an avid user of WordPress since 2.0 Duke and bbPress. I can write whatever I want despite working for Automattic. This is my blog, and I don’t want to appear as a good employee in everyone’s eyes.

Back in the days

Why do I work at Automattic? Back in the day, our system administrator switched the webserver from IIS to Apache, so we started building our first simple sites with WordPress for our customers. We chose something ready and did not move all our ASP code to PHP. I was the only one knowing a little bit of PHP, so we speeded up our work by making small plugins, custom themes, and some core patches here and there. No more strange server objects, no more ADO. It was good!

Back to our days

There have been a lot of discussions about the WPEngine / Automattic / WordPress foundations situation these hours, and it is interesting to read all the comments, whether they mean or not. This is the most interesting to me despite not having the classic +200 comments HN-style: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41652760. Hacker News is the only place nowadays where I am sure that every comment without a text-color similar to the main table #f6f6ef is a good one to read.

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.

Matt

This is true, and it is the base of OSS. Many people who are not developers, engineers, or related to the IT world know about it. When you use something for free and can do something to help who provide what you are using, you should do it. I try to do it for all the small things I do every day. Not that you are terrible if you don’t donate money to Nginx, a server you use all day!

A small story from today

I was talking with a new friend and told him that my two favorite books are Roadside Picnic and Catch-22. My library caught fire some years ago and destroyed my 200-book collection. He was very kind. He thought I had only the e-book, so he gave me the physical copy, so I had two copies.

So what about now? Can I do something for somebody or not? Should I hide my old copy inside a drawer and keep the new one given to me with a smile? Yes, I can do something. So today, after my usual espresso at the bar with my friend, we went to our road public library.

It’s a small box where you can leave one of your books, pick another, return it after you read it, or maybe take it from you forever.

What if most people get the significant part of the book and don’t leave anything? Or maybe grab all the books and sell them? You can do it! No problem. But this tiny box is made to share experiences, books that you love, poems, and stories you’ve written. I hope whoever reads Comma-22 will like it as much as I do and leave another book of them. We are about to open another one in the city next to mine. People who know about this they give us what they can.

About WP Engine and that tiny box

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.

Matt

WP Engine is not a charitable organization; they (Silver Lake) want to make money and do a lot. It would be best to give back something when you use software to earn millions of dollars. You can not do it, obviously, but you should.

WP Engine has always had a strong approach to giving back to our community, giving back to our employees, and giving back to our industry. This commitment is woven throughout our core values from Do the right thing to Committed to giving back.

One of the WP Engine core values

And:

WP Engine believes in the power of open source and the power of the WordPress community. Open Future is devoted to increasing open source visibility and capability in the world of WordPress and beyond.

Open Future | Engine for Good at WP Engine

WP Engine gets from the WordPress ecosystem without giving much back. The Open Source community is built by people for people. Everybody should add what they can, like a book in a tiny box.

@online{zaerl2024-about-matt-mullenweg-wordcamp-us-ecosystem-thinking,
  author = {Francesco Bigiarini},
  title = {About Matt Mullenweg WordCamp US & Ecosystem Thinking},
  date = {2024-09-26},
  url = {https://zaerl.com/2024/09/26/about-matt-mullenweg-wordcamp-us-ecosystem-thinking/},
  urldate = {2024-09-26}
}