I am an open-source fanatic. I started my open-source career by contributing to WebKit in 2005. WebKit is an open-source software component for rendering web pages (an essential part of first Safari and later Chrome). The idea of working on something that everybody could use was so inspiring. The whole concept of open source has always appealed to me. I liked the equality and the openness of WebKit. I loved that everyone, including me, could contribute to something.
In 2006, I started working at an SEO agency. Way before that, I had had my own website, but I wanted to write more about SEO and decided to use a CMS. And it had to be an open-source CMS. I chose WordPress because it was the most SEO-friendly at the time. Still is, I think.
I quickly became a WordPress fanboy. I wrote a lot about WordPress on my blog and became an active member of the WordPress community. I made my first contribution to WordPress Core in 2007. And I developed some WordPress plugins that helped your site rank high in Google. Those plugins escalated into Yoast.
So much has changed for me. Yoast brought us great financial success. But I am still an open-source fanatic. I still believe that open source is the way forward. In fact, I have been trying out all kinds of open-source tools lately and I want those to flourish. I’m talking about tools like Documenso (open-source Docusign competitor, which I recently installed), Twenty (open-source CRM), and Cal.com (open-source Calendly). These tools work together, link to each other, and are ambassadors for each other’s projects. All of them. But WordPress isn’t a part of these people’s minds. They don’t see WordPress as “their world”.
Perhaps WordPress has become so big that we have our very own community and are in less need to belong to the broader open-source community as well. Still, I would like to invite you all to try these open-source software projects. And cheer them on! Because also outside the CMS market, the future should still be open-source!
