In this article, I use Matt Mullenweg’s response to a recent article based on an interview he gave to Inc. as a framework to outline some of the reasons why the WordPress project needs a new governance model. I support recent calls for this change. In addition to other reasons I have outlined in related posts, I recap here Matt’s departure from FLOSS ideals, his misrepresentation of his motives in attacking WP Engine, and in attempts to then cast himself as the victim. I then briefly discuss how the increasingly chaotic atmosphere in the community…
In this article, I highlight a few points of WordPress history that were early indicators of an eventual crisis in the project leadership. With increasing calls and support for a leadership change in the project, I review how the direction and goals set by Matt Mullenweg are increasingly at odds with FLOSS values and with the needs of the WordPress community. Matt’s needs are primarily aligned with Automattic’s over those of the community, and the strain is starting to show along numerous fault lines.
The context for this article is the publishing of recent views by Henrik Luehrsen, Joost de Valk, and others who are pointing out that WordPress needs to modernize its Core and deal with its technical debt. In this context, they advocate for making greater use of canonical plugins, which project co-founder Matt Mullenweg supports. The general consensus is that WordPress seems to have lost its way under Mullenweg’s leadership, and needs to establish a roadmap for the Core software that restores its earlier value on simplicity. In this article, I affirm greater use of canonical…
In this article I consider the Free Rider Problem and how it applies to free software, with references to the “Tragedy of the Commons” and the “Maker-Taker” problem. We find that with a nominal production cost approaching zero for free software, the free rider problem is not economically applicable. Moreover, when examining the nature of free software as a commons, we find that not only is it non-rivalrous, it is an anti-rival good. Far from being a problem, so-called “free-riders” actually increase the network value of the software, with each additional user contributing more value…
Most of the economic theory we operate under today dates back to Adam Smith in 1776. Smith made a fundamental assumption about individuals being motivated by self-interest, and used this motivation as a predictor for free market economic theory. Much of what was later based on Smith’s work miscasts his views somewhat, but for the past 250 years, the core assumption about individual motivations predicting group behaviour have been left largely unchallenged within our common conception and practice of economics. The assumption has been challenged and largely displaced in the academic study of economics, as…
In his WCUS talk and elsewhere, Matt Mullenweg 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 Hardin’s “TC” theory to maintain the premise under which he’s about to attack WP Engine. Rather than staking the philosophy of an open source project and its ecosystem on this fundamentally flawed, baseless theory, we need discard it and build on a better foundation.
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…