yawp (noun): a harsh or hoarse cry, or yelp.
yawp (verb): shout or exclaim hoarsely; to make a raucus noise or clamour.
Like Gutenberg’s printing press, the word “yawp” comes from the 15th century, known later from a line in an 1892 poem by Walt Whitman, “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
The girl pictured is the original header image from the blogging software b2, which referred to itself as a “classy news/weblog tool (aka logware)” from roughly 2001 to 2003.
yawp (.foo): YAWP is a recursive acronym, and like “foo”, it can have many meanings, as long as the acronym remains recursive. Yawp is Another Web Platform. Capitalize it however you like, dangit.
I think she’s yawping. Are you ready to yawp?
What?
About
In late September 2024, we entered a chaotic interlude in the history of WordPress, involving not just the software, but the major players involved and the community around, with implications for the wider open source software movement.
The pretext on which the controversy began is disastrously wrong, based in demonstrably flawed logic. As the WP Community sets to re-lay its foundation, it is imperative we not repeat the same mistakes. Here I’m referring not simply to practical matters like governance structures, but the free and open source software (FOSS) philosophy and ethos, which are fundamental to the community.
Looking for more context? There are many summaries online, both as news stories and as running chronologies to links. There’s a (co-)founder, a private equity firm, a lawsuit, lots of fallout, and a community in crisis.
If you want to read in the order I’m building my thesis, here’s the outline:
Latest Article
Why Unmasking the “Tragedy of the Commons” Matters
Abstract
In his WCUS talk and elsewhere, Matt Mullenweg has built an argument for Five for the Future on the foundation of the Tragedy of the Commons, casually dismissing Elinor Ostrom’s work to affirm the validity of Garrett Hardin’s “TC” theory. This maintains the premise under which he was about to attack WP Engine, that being that they are a “bad actor” for not contributing enough to the project. Actions and philosophies built on this false premise are damaging. Rather than staking the philosophy of an open source project and its ecosystem on Hardin’s fundamentally flawed theory, we need discard it once and for all to build open source communities on a solid foundation. For this reason, we need to excise this notion from our ideas about the economics of free software.
Unmasking the Tragedy of the Commons
Abstract
Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” was a 135-year-old hypothesis that he presented as inevitable fact. Untested, it was promoted by economists bent on privatization. In 1990, Elinor Ostrom published her work thoroughly disproving the theory. In 2003 upon his death, the university where he was a faculty member denounced Hardin’s theory and Hardin himself for the “morally repugnant and ethically reprehensible”, views underpinning his promotion of the theory. In 2009, Ostrom became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 for her work in this area. Nevertheless, Hardin has become popular among the hard-right — Southern Poverty Law Center maintains his profile in its Extremist Files as a white nationalist.
Coming Up:
- Open Source Software & the Free Rider Problem
- Why Five for the Future is a Fundamentally Flawed Initiative
- Open Source Software Communities as Gift Cultures
- A Survey of FOSS Project Governance Models
- Imagining the Future of a [WordPress] Fork