Give Back … Deeply?

Four days of WCUS. Four happy, helpful, fun, and learning-filled days. And it all became (at best) awkward, and (at worst) confrontational, in the very last session, a Q&A keynote with WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg.

In 2015 Matt urged us to “learn Javascript deeply.” In 2024 it seems he’s admonishing us to give back to WordPress deeply.

The Address

I won’t rehash the actual talk. You can watch it above. You can also read about it on MANY blogs and get many opinions. Some of which I’ll list here.

• Search Engine Journal
• Tech Crunch
• Nate Hoffelder
• Brian Coords
• Justin Ferriman
• Rodrigo Ghedin
• Kevin Geary
• Jonathan Jernigan
• James Giroux
• $hopifreaks
• WordPress.org
• Matt’s blog

And a few social posts to read, too:

• Hacker News
• Reddit Thread
  • Matt’s Reply on Reddit
• Eric Karkovack

The WordPress Ecosystem

Over 21 years ago WordPress was released to the world. Its open source nature going on to grow not only a global community, but also a global ecosystem, fueled to extend WordPress through themes and plugins, and to help grow WordPress to over 40% of the Internet through services and agencies to build sites for themselves and other businesses.

A quick look at the WordPress.org Showcase can serve to show how amazing WordPress websites can be. The recent WCUS Showcase Day is proof of innovation with WordPress. Work done at every Contributor Day is testimony of a community’s desire to help move the open source project forward, and one has only to look at any Slack channel in the official WordPress Slack instance to see the thousands of contributors to not only core, but community, photos, TV, testing, vetting, and so much more.

Many people contribute to WordPress.

And many people (and businesses) profit from business within the WordPress ecosystem.

Five for the Future

Five for the Future (FFtF) is one way that individuals and businesses can pledge to work toward the future of WordPress, the open source project (not to be confused with WordPress.com).

It’s looking at Five for the Future that seems to be at the heart of the controversy (or at least the catalyst for it), although the conversation and accusations grow from there (as seen in the posts listed above).

WP Engine makes a lot of money in the WordPress ecosystem. And their FFtF doesn’t seem to represent 5% of their organization. Which begs the question of how much of the FFtF reporting is accurate.

But it also makes one question how much other goodwill is being done by any organization that isn’t part of the FFtF metrics. Free plugins (in and out of the repo), YouTube tutorials, webinars, podcasts, forum support, and more, don’t seem to have any way to be counted, but certainly contribute to the overall health of the project. And while I’m not commenting specifically on WP Engine, I know that many, if not most of us (individuals and companies) give back to WordPress outside of those metric-driven contributions.

Questions for the Rest of Us

• How accurate is the reporting for FFtF?
  • My guess is that you and your employees are lax in reporting how your pledge and actual work being done corroborate one another. If your company participates, I’d urge you to make sure your employees’ profiles list you as their employer (accurately), as well as listing the hours you sponsor them for work they do in the open source project and the teams they work on.
• Can we use the word “WordPress” in advertising?
  • While there is no trademarked prohibition on using “WP” in your sites, domains, and advertising, maybe this is a good time to confer with your legal team on how you use the WordPress name in advertising. Refer to the WordPress Foundation’s Trademark Policy for more information.

What Now?

Lawsuits are now in play, and I know we will all be watching to see what happens. And while the conversations will slow over the next week, they will continue while all of this plays out.

While none of this is comfortable for any of us (and the hashtag #WPDrama has had an uptick recently), I don’t believe the sky is falling. I do believe that this is an important call for diligence in how we all work within the WordPress community, a review of our own uses of any WordPress trademarks, and thoughtful planning on how to move forward.

I don’t claim to have any answers. But I, like most of you, will be paying attention. I may be a Polyanna, but I remain hopeful for the future of WordPress.

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