Languages of Contribution and Creation

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Written By Dan Knauss

3 thoughts on “Languages of Contribution and Creation”

  1. > What exactly is he giving you? Lifetime free access to ConvertKit? Or just high fives?

    This point illustrates perfectly my frustration with the WordPress space. It implies that people in this space only see value when software is free.

    What he’s giving us is a platform that enables us to make money. And I’d much rather pay for that because it shows that there’s a business model.

  2. I get that. And the opposite position too. Which makes me think there’s room for both, or something in between.

    I don’t *only* see value when software is free; in fact that’s something I usually worry about if it doesn’t tie back to a stable business supporting it. I do see high value in it being open source. If something important is abandoned, someone will take it over.

    Lots of open source platforms enable people to make money, but some are better than others at balancing that with enough coming back to sustain them. In the CMS space, Expression Engine got to market possibly ahead of WordPress as a non-open source product that really caught on for a time but couldn’t keep up. Now it seems successfully rebooted as an open source project with free and paid tiers β€” like Statamic, which has a really nice, established community. There are other examples. They have a culture built around agencies. It’s free and also not free.

    And I think that’s how WordPress is increasingly looking. There’s no such thing as “self-hosted” unless you are a company that owns its own servers, etc. The price for quality “managed hosting” has been around $25/month for years β€” or whatever your metered rate is on DigitalOcean (etc.) if you’re using a big cloud provider. That’s the basic price of WordPress, but how much of that is going back to the project? Would it make a difference to you in your choice of hosts if they certified 5% was going back to the project? And then focused their efforts on helping you be the most successful podcast, membership community, teacher/coach, etc.?

    Trying to find the win-win scenarios here. πŸ™‚

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