Sam Sidler’s writing on delta.blog has been a topic of discussion on this season of Crossword. Sam joined Luke and Jonathan to discuss a wide range of topics, from governance and the benevolent dictator model to Five for the Future and the FAIR project, and finally landing on Sam’s predictions for the future of WordPress. Multiple puns are worked in, Jonathan and Luke argue about altruism, and Sam reminds everyone that he’s not a lawyer.

Transcript#

Luke: Jonathan, today’s guest is Sam Sidler and I’m excited to talk to him for a number of reasons. On the previous Perspective episode that we recorded with John Gruber, we got stuck into a very niche topic. Do you remember Camino? We talked about the early browser Camino and just so happens that Sam Sidler got some of his early work experience contributing to that open source project.

Sam has also worked at Mozilla, Audrey, Automattic, Human Made, and 10up. And now he is blogging at Delta.blog, which is a ghost blog. That’s been also a theme this season. Sam, welcome to the show. Tell us what do you remember about Camino?

Sam: Well, thank you for having me. Camino is actually one of the first ways I got started in open source. I was contributing prior to that to some other very small projects, but Camino is one of those.

One of those moments where there was a web browser that I loved. I was very into Macs. I’m still into Macs. I have all of the Apple devices that I can surrounding me right now. And it was a great browser. And I loved it. And it looked like it could use some help. It looked like it could use some support and some contributions. And I kind of understood the open source concept at the time, having contributed a little bit.

I dove in head first, ended up getting me hired to Mozilla, but to work on Firefox, not on Camino. Camino is always an all volunteer thing. And fun fact, Caminobrowser.org, which is the homepage of the Camino browser, is still online. And that’s something that I still manage just because websites should not die for no other reason than I want it to continue to exist. But yeah, still there.

Luke: That’s awesome.

So Sam, I actually caught up with a former teammate of yours who will remain anonymous and I asked him about you. I said, I’m talking to Sam tomorrow. He, this anonymous person said, well, Sam is full of opinions. So that should be good. And it made me think maybe instead of like an interview style thing, we could just record.

What do think about this, Jonathan? Why don’t we just do a long unplanned episode of Crossword with three people instead of two? And I want to talk about the next one to two years of WordPress, what that might look like.

Jonathan: Let’s do it. And just before we get into that, Sam, given the Camino context, like something that’s just itching at me - how do you think about like the world of browsers these days? Given that sort of background and a clear, like if you volunteer, to me that would indicate some passion for the subject matter. So how do you currently think about the world of browsers?

Sam: It’s hard times, it’s weird times, maybe is a better way to say it. So I currently have probably seven browsers installed on my Mac. I should disclose I’m on my Mac right now, but I have actually been, since the developer beta came out, been primarily working and living within my iPad. Have not been touching my Mac for the past, like this is the first day that I’ve opened my Mac in about three weeks, ⁓ but we don’t have to go down that route right now.

I’m installing every single new web browser that seems to come out. I think that there’s a lot of very compelling innovation that’s happening within the web browser industry right now. One of the cool ones that I was trying not too long ago was Orion, which is from the Kagi search engine - think I’m pronouncing that right. Zen is another one that’s built on top of the Firefox code base. It’s also quite interesting. Many of these those, and of course DuckDuckGo has their own DuckDuckGo browser that I quite like as well. It’s very simple and streamlined. But many of these are kind of, many of these end up having the same problem, which is that they’re built on Chromium. And so what I’ve been looking for is a browser that is not built on Chromium, one that is not, not because there’s anything wrong with what Google is doing with Chrome and Chromium, although…

Arguably there are some things that are not ideal for that industry. But more because I think it’s more compelling and more interesting to see how we can get outside of this Chrome monopoly, quite frankly - the homogeneity that exists today. ⁓ and we’ll see what the U.S. demands of that. I know they want to have Google divest from the Chrome browser. I have no idea what that would look like, how that would function, if that would destroy the industry or reignite something, or something of both maybe.

Luke: I use Safari. Safari is good.

Sam: I use Safari as my primary browser since moving away from Camino.

Jonathan: Okay, so Sam, for those who don’t know, for those who don’t have context, you started writing on delta.blog back in September and you began to cover a bunch of things that will be quite familiar to folks who listen to Crossword. You talked about the WordPress foundation, you’ve been covering the court cases between Automattic WP Engine, you’ve been talking about investments, the FAIR project, Five for the Future. There’s a lot that you’ve been covering. What motivated you to start this? And what’s with Delta? It’s a cool URL. Tell us about that.

Sam: One of the things I’ve noticed within sort of the WordPress community, within how reporting within WordPress and analysis happens is that it’s very focused on exactly what’s happening. And there’s not a lot of going back and looking retroactively and trying to dig into some of why things happen, some of the details. And what I like to think of as the in-between or the delta between how we got from where we were to where we are. That’s where the name comes from, whether it’s good or not, I’ll leave to an exercise of the listener today.

But that’s one of the things I wanted to try to start digging into is to understand, yes, there are problems within the WordPress community. Many people have documented these problems. There’s governance issues, there’s contribution issues from some companies versus others, there’s community incidents that happen. There’s a million things. It’s a huge ecosystem. There’s going to be problems no matter what.

But we seem constantly focused on what’s driving the news, what’s kind of in our news cycle today, and we forget about all of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again, right? And not to be Battlestar Galactica on you here, but that is just a fact of life. Like, we are seeing these cycles within the WordPress ecosystem.

Luke: Okay, but, let me push back on that, Sam, because this is a talking point of Matt Mullenweg too. This isn’t the first time there’s been a problem in the WordPress community. It’s happened three or four times before. When? I mean, when has it been such - and maybe I’m just forgetting - tell me, but I can’t remember any time in WordPress when there’s been so much community pushback, when there’s been a huge like list of a hundred things that the community wants handed down to the leader of the project when there’s been these big calls for change in leadership.

Jonathan: What about Gutenberg?

Luke: Even Gutenberg wasn’t like this. Gutenberg was very different. It a small group of people who wanted to stick to the classic editor. You know, it blew over really quickly. This seems fundamentally different to me. Am I wrong?

Sam: I don’t think you’re wrong. I do think this is fundamentally different. I just think that we’ve seen the seeds of this in many different incidents over the past 20 years, right?

Some very small and some that I feel were chalked up to inexperience of, you know, and I don’t mean this in a bad way at all, like inexperience of an executive, right? When I was in my early 20s, I made a lot of mistakes, right? And there was a lot of mistakes made in the early days of the WordPress ecosystem. But as we’ve grown, we’ve seen this pattern sort of repeated where mistakes keep getting made that are very clearly bad for everyone, bad for the community, bad for the ecosystem, bad for even the leadership ultimately because they sew distrust. And I don’t think you’re wrong. I 100 % agree that this is sort of the worst it’s gotten, but it is a cycle. It’s just that the circle’s getting a little bit bigger, if you will.

Luke: Right. So like you’re talking about the Envato thing where Envato got banned from WordCamps and still is. Wasn’t there some controversy with Thesis back in the day? That all of that sort of thing. These are just like stepping stones or the seeds is a good way of putting it.

Jonathan: Hmm. Yep, with Chris Pearson, there was some controversy about the setting up of the trademark. This has been a long time, but Automattic giving it and then getting the license back. I remember reading some of the comments going back where like, “mark our words, this is gonna be problematic in the future”. You could argue that that’s with two T’s. That was a decade ago, right? I couldn’t resist.

Sam: Yeah. Well, and there have been other people who have written about this at the time. Like this is happening now. I predict failure in the future. And they stood up. I mean, honestly, one of the reasons Ghost exists today is because of problems in the WordPress ecosystem that were flagged and ignored. And so John went and moved on and built his own thing. Again, started as a fork, very different now, different code base and everything, but that’s how it got its start. And so we’ve seen these fractures. We’ve seen these splits.

I don’t know that, had everyone done everything perfectly over the past 20 years, that there still would not have been fractures and splits. Of course there would, right? We are millions of people around the world, if you include WordPress users within the grand ecosystem, and we all have differing opinions of everything. So of course there’s going to be fractures and problems within our community. It’s how we solve them and how we move through those problems that I think matters.

Jonathan: Yeah. Right, and I would argue that those fractures even are evidence of WordPress’s strength as an ecosystem as a whole, right? It’s that resilience from the non-homogeneity, which is what you get when you have different views and opinions. So Sam, from your perspective then, how would you articulate, what’s the heart of the issue here? As, like if you take the last 20 years, how would you articulate from your perspective, what’s the core issue at stake?

Sam: That’s a hard one to answer. I think that… Ultimately, it comes down to a governance issue and a governance question. And ultimately, it comes down to, is the model of a benevolent dictator sustainable for an ecosystem as large as WordPress? Certainly, it is sustainable for very small projects, open source projects. Certainly, it is sustainable for some moderately large WordPress projects, or excuse me, open source projects. Is it sustainable for something as large as WordPress? And I know there are other examples.

Luke: Is Linux not as large?

Sam: That’s the biggest example everyone uses but you have to look at Linux a little bit differently, right? Linux is at its core a kernel, right and what Linux has been built upon, like it’s that plugin ecosystem, right? It’s not, obviously we have WordPress plugins, the kernel is something quite different, but it’s how you build upon it that has mattered quite a bit for Linux and how you build on WordPress matters, but the core software matters too.

Luke: Yeah, yeah.

Sam: Linux also doesn’t have what I would call the same kind of community, right? So, and again, when I say Linux, I mean the software project in particular. Obviously, the Linux Foundation has multiple hundreds of communities really all working together. But when you look at the software itself, there isn’t a large ecosystem in the same way that there is within the WordPress community ecosystem.

Jonathan: One of the things that I would argue that’s problematic, no pun intended, yet with the benevolent dictator model is that it doesn’t even matter how well intended the dictator may be. There’s all these unintended consequences of like you wake up one day and say, hey, I’m gonna be helpful. And you go in and show up somewhere and ask questions.

And it has all these unintended consequences that the person by nature of their position can end up just being blind to no matter how good their intentions are, which is what I would argue is the challenge at this scale. Like there’s just so much that a human, an individual cannot keep on top of.

And then if you add to that, I would argue my suspicion that Matt is in a bit of a, we’re all in bubbles of various sorts, but I would argue that Matt is in a bubble in particular where there’s fewer people that are gonna outright disagree on something. It’s gonna be, because there’s risks and fears and ramifications to that, which means that you’re in a more and more vulnerable position over time, counter-intuitively, for all the power you think you have, to end up just making poor decisions in context of a large ecosystem. That’s always been the heart of my concern, that Matt’s views, at least historically haven’t been ecosystem wide in thinking through the ramifications. It’s been very product focused.

Sam: Yeah, and perhaps another way to frame that is to say it’s not necessarily that Benevolent Dictator as a model cannot function for an open source project that’s this large and this wide, if you will. But it could be that how this particular Benevolent Dictator has set up this ecosystem has created companies that he profits from. And again, he should profit from them. We’re in a capitalistic society. People should profit from their creations in some way, shape or form. But that direction that his company goes can be at odds with the rest of the ecosystem and the community and everything else. And how do you negotiate between those two things? And how do you make a decision that everyone can see is made in the benevolent mindset, right? I feel like you can’t, to be quite honest.

Luke: That’s the trick is being benevolent as well as a dictator. I actually really like the benevolent dictator model. Maybe that’s a surprise to some people. I think it works really well. I think with open source projects, it is a natural counterbalance to the inevitable group think that you would otherwise get and the inevitable loud minority, designed by committee.

But I think I’m just worried about the benevolent part at the moment. There are, there have been other BDFLs that have stepped down and been replaced by like steering councils or steering committees, like Python comes to mind and Redis, but I don’t know, if that, I feel like those projects, they sort of enter a phase of maintenance at that point and not growth.

Sam: Yeah. I’ve seen it. Again, like I think that we, and I don’t mean this as a slight on anyone in particular, but we within the WordPress community have kind of segregated ourselves from the rest of the open source community. And we are not aware of other models that work because we don’t have that wide view. We don’t attend open source events. We don’t talk to open source communities to understand how they’ve tried things and what’s working and what hasn’t, because there are other failures, right? There’s not a perfect governance model that I think works for everyone to be very clear.

Can we come up with something that works better for the WordPress ecosystem? I do think so. I think something akin to a product lead that is elected for a two or three or four year period. So they have some amount of vision supported by a steering committee, supported by - and maybe that’s not right. That’s one idea. There’s a million more and they have been tried by other communities. We just have to investigate them.

Jonathan: So what’s bugging me here as I think about this is at the heart of the issue, from my perspective, is it’s one about power and control. And at least as I read the situation, at least at a high level, there’s just not a lot of incentive for Matt to really affect any changes. And that may be a bit unfair - no pun intended - but when I look at this, it’s like… enough feedback or, and giving Matt the benefit of the doubt, when there is a clear articulation of a set of problems, there is a pattern of being able to respond and adjust and demonstrate growth and get out of a bubble. I see evidence that all of that’s possible.

Luke and I, in the last episode of Crossword, we were looking ahead at the future and trying to imagine where some of this might go, what the possibilities are. And at least from my point of view right now, Matt remains a significant dependency. I, yeah, I’m curious for your thoughts on this, Sam. You’ve dug into this deeply for some time. You got involved in the FAIR project. I’d love to hear more about that and your level of involvement and interest. But at least from my point of view, so much of how things have been structured today have been about Matt, whether consciously or not, intentionally or not, maintaining control.

Sam: Yeah, I do think that there is a path forward in some way without Matt someday, if it should come to that. I don’t think we’re there yet, right? I think that there are ways for Matt to come around without changing everything within the WordPress ecosystem, without necessarily changing the governance model, but becoming more open to input, to ideas, to new directions, and hopefully to change, quite frankly. And we’ve seen some of this. What I don’t know from my outside view is if those changes are forced in some way because of these legal cases, because of just perception and wanting to improve that perception..

Luke: It feels that way sometimes, doesn’t it?

Sam: ..or if there is some sort of a change. Now we have seen over the years, we’ve seen him come around to ideas. Sometimes it’s quite slow. There’s a saying that, you know, tell me once and I’ll ignore you, tell me 10 times and I might start listening. It’s entirely possible that’s what we’re seeing, but it’s hard to know. I can’t read into his mind.

Jonathan: What I’m not seeing are the incentives. My question I’m always asking is what are someone’s incentives for change? And I think most of us generally think that we’re doing good and helpful things. And when I look at Matt’s behavior, my belief is that for a lot of it, he really thought that he was doing the quote unquote right thing and has been surprised at the pushback.

Luke: I don’t know, Jonathan. Like I think with incentives that like that is a model that I like to apply to the world too. But in the case of an open source project, in the case of a benevolent dictator, you’re really, the whole thing only works if that benevolent dictator is willing to ignore their incentives to do evil or, you know, that’s an exaggeration of course, but it, I don’t know if the whole system is really designed around having the incentives, the right incentives in place. It’s more like you guys are expected to contribute out of the goodness of your heart. That is why you do it. There’s no real proper motivation. There’s no real incentive to contribute to open source other than you like it. You think it’d be.

Jonathan: But that’s never been true, Luke. We’ve covered this a lot - that’s never been true. People don’t, like I would argue that at the end of the day, we all have an incentive. For some people it’s the praise, for some people it’s the camaraderie, for some people that…

Luke: Of course. Yeah, that’s true. That is true, but it’s not a systematic thing..

Jonathan: Right, and I think when we’re not honest about that is when we get problems. Like, I don’t think it’s honest to go and ask people to contribute 5% out of altruism. It’s like, you have to be able to connect that to benefit or it won’t be sustainable. Because I may feel altruistic today and feel like the good vibes after coming out of a word camp and just want to do something because I feel good about it. But how am going to feel in six months when those good vibes aren’t there anymore?

Luke: I think it could be sustainable. I mean, I think, sorry, I’m just ignoring Sam here. It’s just an argument between you and I now, but I think altruism can be a sustainable model. If you want to be honest about recognizing these incentives for altruism, know, like bragging rights, ego, that sort of thing, then yeah, we can be honest about that too. But I think lots of projects work well on altruism and

I think that they can be sustainable. And that’s kind of, to me, the role of the BDFL in the BDFL model is that that’s the bee, that’s the benevolence is the altruism. saying, look, I am going to do my own thing here and make money in my own way, but also going to give of my time and my product direction into this project.

Jonathan: I don’t buy it. Sam, what do you think?

Sam: So when I think about incentives for companies to contribute, the way I look at it is that five for the future was kind of set up wrong, in some ways. And there’s a million ways, but the ways specifically to incentives that it’s worth drilling into are that it’s not clear how a company could contribute 5% and actually have an impact within the WordPress ecosystem.

Jonathan: I agree, yeah. Yes, and there’s a lot of mixed messages in that regard.

Sam: There’s a lot of mixed messages, right? And so if there was a way for, you know, and I’ll pick on WP Engine because they’re in this war now with Matt, right? If there was a way for them to have that large of an impact within the direction of WordPress core, Gutenberg, the community, events, all of these different pieces, don’t you think they would jump at that chance?

I mean…I feel like they would, but they’ve over the years, and this is true of every major company to some extent, right? With the exception of Automattic, they’ve been hampered, right? They haven’t been allowed fully into that sort of open source ecosystem to contribute.

Jonathan: Well, and you called this out in your Five for the Future piece, one of the things that, well, hold up. So one of things that you called out Sam, the five for the future piece is at the end of the day, in what became public about the licensing negotiations between Automattic and WP engine is that they were asked to do like 8%, but the gotcha line there was at the direction of wordpress.org, which is effectively at Matt’s direction, who is a competitor.

So to your point, Sam, as I look at WP Engine’s arc and narrative, at least at a high level, it’s like you would expect that they would see a clear incentive to be more involved and have a bigger influence and impact on the project. And yet there’s a conflict of interest there of multiple levels.

Luke: I completely agree, Five for the Future is broken and has been from its inception. But we have examples of companies deciding to commit great resources to WordPress that aren’t Automattic. The first one that comes to mind for me is Yoast. And I think it can be done. There really is nothing stopping WP Engine. There, let’s say was, there was nothing stopping WP Engine from just saying, you know what, I’m just going to spin up a division of a hundred folks and they’ll each, you know, that’ll include some management layers and then we’re interested in the hosting side, we’re going to dedicate this team. They’re going to work on hosting and we’re also interested in performance. So we’re going to contribute to the performance team like Google does. Right? That’s another great example. I obviously Google is not 5%, not 0.05%, but you know what I mean? Like it’s like, this is something that’s, they could have done that and they could have been having an impact. There wasn’t anything stopping them from doing that except that their WP engine is just a big, slow moving lumbering corporation of a company and they can’t do anything with any sort of alacrity. And so that was never going to happen.

Sam: So I disagree, right? So we’ve seen Yoast. Yoast is a great example, contribute lots to the WordPress ecosystem in many different teams, not only to core itself, right? But to many different parts of the ecosystem.

Luke: Yep, and we mean the company, not the person.

Sam: And we mean the company, not the person, but including the person, at one point head of marketing, I forget his title for WordPress, however short-lived that was. We’ve seen that happen. Yes. But I can point to a dozen other companies that have tried, that have hired engineers, dedicated them to WordPress, to WordPress core, and then had them sit around and twiddle their thumbs because they don’t know where to get involved. No one is guiding them.

They start writing code, it’s rejected because it’s not part of Matt’s roadmap. It’s not the four things, the four phases of Gutenberg at the time, right? And this is a repeated cycle. And even when they are contributing to those areas, because of that closed ecosystem that’s been creative, that feedback loop within Automattic, they can’t really get a foot in the door. And this has been a perpetual problem, right? So it’s potentially a chicken and egg scenario here, but it’s really hard to incentivize companies. And WP Engine did have contributors many years ago now, right, to WordPress itself.

Luke: yeah, I was one of them.

Sam: There you go, right? And that ultimately was a kind of experiment that failed, right? They did not see the investment being worth it. And so yes, there is an altruism that would be great. I wish every company wanted to donate their time and money and resources to open source. That’s not really realistic in a capitalistic society that we live in. For some people, for some companies it works. For others, it doesn’t. They have to see some of that value add, some of that benefit for all of their investment.

Jonathan: I’m going to pull on a bit of a cynical thread for a moment. As I’m thinking back over the past seven plus years, I think to when Google first got involved, we, Luke and I were both at XWP at the time. So we were pretty intimately indirectly involved in, in their sort of foray into the WordPress space. They famously did too much at the first WordCamp. People were suspicious of like, why, why is Google here? And they had to learn to like tone back their like level of involvement.

Google is someone that I would argue had a clear incentive to contribute. WordPress’s success is part of what ensures that there is a web to index and put ads on that, clear financial incentive. And Google, I would argue, is an exception to the rule in that I would posit from both direct and indirect experience that they had to work quite uphill to get established in the project and that Automattic was not welcoming of their their interests except to where it fit within Automattic’s interests where they wanted the energy to go, which so to me, it’s like when people raise their hands, “Hey, we’re willing to put engineers”, at least the vibe coming out of this, whether it’s accurate or not is like, “That’s great if you put them where we want them”. And then the question becomes who’s the we and it’s like, at the direction of dot org, which we now know to be at the direction of Matt and..

Luke: I think there’s some gray to that. I don’t think it’s quite so clear cut as that. Certainly it is true that there are private Slack channels that you have to sort of be invited to, be able to contribute properly, say to Gutenberg or something like that. And also it’s true that like people just get thrown at the project to have no experience. I think if you want to be contributing to WordPress, then the correct way to do it is you take people who are established already in the project. And this is something that Elementor does really well. They take people who are established, who already have a bit of momentum, who are known and working on something that they’re passionate about. And then they empower them as opposed to hiring someone or trying to upskill someone.

Jonathan: That’s a fair point. We have seen that where companies like, hey, here’s someone who shows up and it’s like that can be unproductive as well, right? They can end up working on something that has real no merit.

Luke: And it’s like, how long is this person going to be around? We have to onboard them. You know, like, are they going to be?

Jonathan: Yes, yep, and it’s going to take the time of other volunteers. That’s a fair point.

Sam: I do want to circle back because I think we started on the incentive conversation really talking about the incentive format in particular. And we kind of diverted over to the, to everyone contributing to WordPress. I do think Matt does have incentive to be benevolent and we kind of look past this and brush past this all the time in talking about him and kind of separating him from the man, from the myth, if you will, right? But if you go back to his statements, if you really look at his public statements for why he started this war and you take him at his word, WordPress is his life’s work and

Jonathan: Yes, it’s his legacy.

Sam: This is his legacy and if it all comes crashing down, comes crumbling down, that is, that’s him. That’s everything right there.

Jonathan: Well, and Sam, to that point, I remember when Luke and I have talked about this a bunch. When Matt first started writing about this, it was easy, at least for me, to feel a resonance and a sympathy with the heart of the message that I was hearing. And the disconnect was like, okay, well, that makes sense, but we would have been with you on this. But the way that Matt went about it made it suddenly - Luke and I who were no big friends of WP Engine were in the position of feeling like, they’re being treated unfairly here. There’s some great people at WP Engine that are being thrown under the bus. There’s all this stuff that’s going on. And it’s like, if Matt had just approached it in a different way, it would have been a lot easier to have resonated with at least an understanding of that core message.

Luke: Do you think it’s possible that Matt is just, or do you think it’s possible even to, for a person to become too passionate about something, too involved, too much identity attached to a project that all of a sudden you, I don’t know, you start making these big, big rash decisions and are far less able to listen to other people’s ideas and opinions?

Sam: Yeah. I think it’s hard to know what’s in his head right now or what was in his head at least in September to kind of trigger all of this. And he can go back and say that this started previously and perhaps some of these, you know, some of this communication, some of these problems did start prior to that. But that is when things really went public and really got dramatic in what I would consider a bad way. Jonathan, I agree with you. Like there are so many things that Matt was saying and continues to say that I agree with.

I want a solid community and ecosystem with companies across the world contributing, if not 5%, certainly a significant portion of their time and effort to helping WordPress in some way. I think that’s a great thing for the future of WordPress itself and the future of our ecosystem. I don’t think this was the right way to do it. And I don’t think the actions he took that resulted in this lawsuit were appropriate, quite frankly. That’s my personal opinion. That’s not how I would have approached it. But again, I don’t know what was tried behind closed doors either. So it’s hard for me to know.

Luke: Mm. I think it’s fair to say that’s an opinion shared by certainly most others on this podcast and many in the community. Let’s like turn our attention away from what happened at WordCamp US a year ago and forward to the next 12 months. We got another WordCamp US not too far away. Do you think, are we likely to see some more fireworks or? Is this going to be a back pedal?

Sam: I don’t think it’s either, right? I think we’re gonna see what we’ve seen at every WordCamp since that he’s attended. You know, WordCamp Asia, WordCamp Europe, even the State of the Word at the end of last year. It’s going to be subtle hints toward it, little messages, but ultimately it’s not something he’s gonna speak on. I know he was just interviewed quite recently. He didn’t reveal anything. And I don’t expect him to at this point. I think his lawyers have finally convinced him that not talking is better than talking, even if your message is a good message.

Luke: Yeah, on Decode, he was very, “I don’t think I should talk about that.. the lesson that I’ve learned is to keep my mouth shut a little bit more often”. Yeah. I mean, that’s fair enough.

Jonathan: That’s part of what troubled me early on is like watching some of his interviews where I’m like, I think he really believes he’s in the right. He really believes he’s doing a helpful thing. And as I listen, it’s like there’s a disconnect, which to me, I attributed to he’s ended up however he got there in some kind of a bubble where reality is distorted to some degree to where it’s like he thinks this is a good idea. When most of us are like, this isn’t gonna go anywhere.

Luke: But is the bubble breaking? That’s the question.

Sam: I don’t think so, but it’s impossible for me to know, right?

Jonathan: Well, and let’s take this to Luke’s point. As we look to the future, Sam, I think it’s fair. So for me, one of the more difficult moments in this whole experience was when Matt came out publicly and said, .org is mine. I felt that like a bit of a shot to the heart because I’m 20 years into this community, this ecosystem. I’ve made it like, I feel this like a deep love for WordPress and for the community around it. It’s one of the few brands that I’ve been and still continue to be happy to be directly associated with and connected to my identity. And then when Matt came out and was like, “hey, it’s mine, it’s not yours”. To me that hit right at the heart of what I think has been so key to WordPress’s success - this concept of shared ownership. When I volunteer, when I put my time, when I convert someone else to WordPress, it’s the sense that I’m inviting them to also have a piece of this thing and that they take that up and it’s theirs.

So I think that’s sort of unsettled me a bit, but I could also argue that I’m too far in it at this point, right? For that to be that big of a deal. But others - I think it’s making me wonder, like, where do we go from here? And I don’t know, that’s what I wanna explore with the two of you. Because I think we have a lot of data points. There’s multiple factors in play. There’s the case, the ramifications of that positive or negative, the consequences.

We now know that there’s gonna be a 6.9 release, a 7.0 is gonna be on its way. There’s some big things happening. And there are fantastic people who are still, whatever their incentives are, contributing to moving this project forward. I guess my question for you, Sam, is if we look a few years into the future, will this just be a blip on the radar and it’ll be kind of back to business as usual?

Do you see big changes coming out of this? What do you think will be some of the ramifications of this past year?

Sam: Yeah, I first off as to where we go, have you considered Ghost? Cause it’s, it’s pretty good just for the record, for blogging and newsletters and stuff. Maybe not for, maybe not for everything, but I quite like it. I do think that what has happened is a transformational shift for WordPress and it is bad.

I’ve heard from clients, I’ve heard from corporate customers and clients, and they are looking at moving off of WordPress. Not because anything that’s been done is caused a security issue or flagged problems for them, but because this uncertainty, this legal uncertainty, just makes them uncomfortable. Right? These are large fortune 500 companies that don’t want to deal with a company or an entity or a person whose website is just out there and they’re giving their information to them and it all starts to get a little confusing and incoherent, quite frankly. And they have large procurement teams, risk management teams that are saying, uh-uh, this is not safe anymore. This is not, this is not a known quantity anymore.

And you have, of course, WordPress VIP in that room saying it’s safe, Automattic’s got your back. And their question back is, what about this WordPress.org thing - that is not Automattic, that is not owned by a nonprofit or an entity of any kind. It’s just an individual’s. What about that? And that causes problems. And once you start to lose some of those corporate customers, you start to lose some of your ecosystem.

Jonathan: Well, and especially when the message to a number of those corporate customers was like, you just made a bad choice with WP Engine. Come on over to VIP, we’ll take care of you. That’s a disruptive move. There was a whole process you went through and to suddenly have that communication, just come over to VIP. It’s like, wait a minute, what’s going on here? These are big moves, these take years. Yeah.

Luke: Feels a bit mafia.

Sam: Yeah, and I mean to the case itself, I have no idea how that case will turn out, right? I have some intuition just because if you look at the preliminary injunctions, they are not normally granted. There’s a high bar there. So there is some indication that at least WP Engine will win on some of their claims. Will they win on all of them? I don’t know. How many? How much would it cost Automattic or Matt personally? I have no idea, right? What kind of damage that could do?

Luke: Will it settle before it even goes to court?

Sam: I doubt it, but it’s possible. Right. And the reason why I doubt it and I’ll, you know, I am not a lawyer. I should probably preface everything with, am not a lawyer. I’m not a developer. I should say all of those things ahead of time. But just knowing that WP Engine has lost so many customers as a result of this, even if they’ve gained more after to make up for that, that loss is significant and that monetary damage is significant. And I don’t know how Automattic could afford just in settlement to give them all of those customers, give them all that money, like it doesn’t seem realistic from a legal perspective.

Jonathan: And Matt’s calls were so explicit, like, come on over. The campaign, Pressable was campaigning, VIP was campaigning. It was very explicit.

Sam: So the legal case, who knows how it’s gonna turn out. I do think it will go to trial. At the end, I don’t know what that looks like, right? There will be an appeal because there’s always an appeal. Doesn’t matter who’s suing who these days.

Luke: Yeah, it’s going to be years.

Do you think that it’s going to detract from the project itself? Because I don’t know if you remember in the before times before Matt used the WordCamp US platform to disparage WP Engine. A lot of people were - the big, the big issue was Gutenberg and the Site Editor and it’s confusing and how do themes work again? And I’m not sure all of this WordPress stuff, how it works anymore. I used to understand it, but now with the Site Editor, it’s very confusing. I feel like that should be a priority to get fixed. And I also, sort of seems like it’s now on the back burner a bit.

Sam: The actual software itself will slowly improve just as it has done or iteratively improved just as it has done for the past decade, right? ⁓ To your point, I hear that message a lot, like the Site Editor is hard, even the Block Editor, that was the message earlier, the Block Editor is hard, those have kind of died down, but now it’s the Site Editor that’s the problem, right? I think that’s really just adopting new technology is hard. And it’s even harder for the people implementing that technology, for the agencies who have to go in and teach this to their clients and explain it to them.

Luke: Right. Yeah.

Sam: I’m quite fond of the Site Editor, quite honestly. Once you get the hang of it, it’s quite nice. There are problems, to be very clear. There are all of these rough edges. Do those get fixed? Honestly? Does Automattic care? That’s ultimately the question. If Automattic cares, those get fixed. If Automattic doesn’t care, they don’t, because Automattic controls the future of Gutenberg.

Jonathan: Yeah. Sam, where do you think, at least from your perspective now, what are some of the things that you’d expect to see over the next couple of years? Just given the, I like to think, I think a lot about momentum and like, where is something trending? And the question I have in my mind right now is how much of this is just like what we’re seeing who are especially close to it? Is this, and a couple of months back, Luke and I were chatting about this and it was like, is this a,

Is this a 5% impact to the ecosystem? Is it a bigger one? Like what are the seeds that have been planted now? And what are those ramifications gonna call out? Because it’s possible that this is just a, it’s not that big of a deal. Yes, people have moved away, but you know, whatever they’re gonna, that’s gonna be. What do you think Sam, as you look to the next couple of years are gonna be some of the ramifications of what has happened?

Sam: It’s hard to predict, And I don’t, I’m not, also not a fortune teller. I guess I should have disclaimed that as well.

Jonathan: Of course. Wait, what? What? I thought that you were just gonna tell us.

Sam: I’ll do my best, I’ll do my best.

I think the core software itself will slow down, right? There are people who, developers, engineers, designers, just users who are moving to other platforms and will continue that move over time, whether they be at the enterprise level or the individual level. And that shift is going to take place just naturally as a result of this. As a result, there’ll be fewer contributors. There’ll be fewer people using the software, trying it and building upon it. That slows down product development quite frankly. Automattic can only drive so much if they keep their 5%. That’s great, but they’ve also shrunk as a company by 25% in the past year. And that’s much smaller from a contribution standpoint. How much smaller they get beyond that, I don’t know, who knows, it really is going to depend on the outcome of that case, probably. We’ll have to wait and see.

As far as like market share goes, I think, and we’ll see if I’m wrong, I think 2025 might be the peak of WordPress. And that it’ll be downhill from here. It’s possible all of this changes, of course, and who can truly predict the future, but I do think that the impact that this is going to have is significant. And we can see it from a bunch of anecdotal evidence throughout all of our daily lives, but even look at WordCamp US. You mentioned it earlier. It’s coming up. It’s in August, I think. Ticket sales are down significantly, like 80% down or something.

I’m sure they will pick up. There’s always a bit of increase near the end. But if WordCamp US is down, if, you know, the one WordCamp of the year that is supposed to be the most important WordCamp is down, what does that look like for the rest of the community? What does that look like for the smaller events? We’re seeing a lot of, a lot of events that are no longer WordCamps that are spinning out and doing their own things in Minnesota and Buffalo, Arizona.

Jonathan: Yep. I would offer, I’m tracking with you generally, I would offer a counter, which is that part of it’s also fair to call out that there’s an appropriate level of concern about like coming in and out of the U.S. right now. WordCamp Canada as a counterpoint is actually seeing a lot of interest and, but, there’s, there’s no mistaking that there is a depression on the interest. There is not the enthusiasm that there was a couple of years ago. So that like how, yeah.

Luke: There’s also a contributor age problem. We’re not attracting younger developers.

Sam: I mean, the argument against that, of course, is WordPress Campus Connect, which kind of frightens me quite honestly when they were talking at WordCamp Europe and mentioning that 5,000 people are gonna come needing to contribute some time or something along those lines. I don’t know who’s going to help them. Like, we don’t have a community to support that significant amount of people, but we’ll see what happens soon enough, I guess.

Jonathan: Luke, you might be seeing a whole lot of new contributions.

Luke: They’ll all build plugins and submit them to the plugin repo all at the same time.

Sam: Or will they use ChatGPT to build them too, I suppose?

Luke: Certainly. Yep. And they’ll communicate with Plugin Review via ChatGPT as well.

Jonathan: I think there’s an irony, there’s something I’m feeling here where it’s like, Matt seems to have been always especially passionate about the growth of WordPress and like seeing, like let’s see the numbers increase, right? And at least as I’ve understood it, his pushing out against like private equity and starting this self-ascribed like war has been to ensure that WordPress continues to grow. And at least from my point of view, it’s ended up having this unintended like opposite effect, which actually gives me some hope for Matt’s like potential ability to course correct and recognize that he’s basically had the opposite effect that he intended. He thought he was like trying to save the future of WordPress by starting this. And to me, it’s had effectively the opposite effect in terms of scaring people off or shifting. I don’t know. That’s an interesting factor for me in this.

Sam: Yeah, I think Matt looked at the software and said the software is why WordPress has been growing.

I think that’s wrong, right? I think it’s always been the community and the ecosystem. It’s the WordCamps, the meetups and the events that kind of started this feedback loop of growth that has really helped it. And yes, it started with engineers and it started with contributors and all of that. But over time, it’s become this bigger, broader thing. And in starting this war, he’s taken advantage of the ecosystem, right?

Jonathan: The ownership, yeah.

Sam: He said, if you’re not contributing code, it doesn’t matter anymore. And that’s, I think that’s, that was the fatal flaw in all of this more than anything else.

Jonathan: That feels right to me. And I think that matches with my own sense of Matt’s focus has been on the product of WordPress. And I think some important moves, right? Like on the whole, the recognition that we needed to innovate, the push into React and Gutenberg and like, whatever you say about it, it’s like you needed some of that energy. And I think that’s part of what, at least in Matt’s mind, might justify some of the moves that he’s taken now.

But that fixation I’d argue like on to your point, the software, like the product of WordPress at the ignorance of the impact of those decisions on the ecosystem of WordPress. I would describe the ecosystem right now as still really diverse and still having a lot of overall resilience. It’s gonna take some time before it would die, but it is in an unhealthy state, I would argue at this point. If you took a sense of the whole thing,

Like it’s, you there’s some strong parts. There’s lots of still things going on, but it’s in a state right now where, except for something that brings health back to it, I would expect it to be on a decline. I think I would agree with you that this is probably peak unless something changes.

Luke: So what could that be, Jonathan? What could be the magic pill?

Jonathan: Well, I’ll put this to you and this can perhaps be our closing topic for the moment. Sam, why did you get involved in this FAIR project? ⁓ And what is your involvement in it?

Sam: That’s a fair question.

Jonathan: Ha.

Luke: You’ve been working on, you’ve been saving that one. You practiced that in the mirror, didn’t you?

Sam: Everybody gets one on every call. That’s all you get is one.

Jonathan: Yes, yes. Well done.

Sam: No, one of the things we’ve seen come out of this is an understanding that too much is kind of within Matt’s grasp.

And he can do whatever he wants with WordPress.org. He can, as you mentioned, Luke, he can publish messages using that platform to every single WordPress install in the world. And that is problematic. Or maybe fewer now that WP Engine disabled that, but he can do that. And that is every part of WordPress.

Luke: To be fair, a few people can do that, but yes, he does do that.

Sam: Sure, Sure, he does do that.

But he can control which people can do that as well. Ultimately, is at his will, at his judgment, who gets to say what and when they get to say it. Some of the messaging, even outside of WP Engine and this war, some of the messaging has sometimes been questionable. Why is this important to publish out to this broad audience of not-engineers? Some of them are, but not most. Why is this important?

Luke: That’s true.

Sam: When I look at FAIR and when I look at what we were trying to do and what we continue to try to do, it’s really about federating this overall ecosystem and saying there is not going to be one sole point that can bring down or one sole person that can bring down the ecosystem anymore. It’s about adding back that trust for enterprise customers, for end users, for hopefully everyone. Now it’s a long path to get there, right? And it doesn’t solve every single problem within the WordPress ecosystem that would be impossible, quite frankly.

Again, as I mentioned earlier, ecosystems are going to have problems and there’s no way around that. But it does knock down one of the bigger problems that was flagged out of all of this. So I see it as a solution to a problem, not as the solution to all of our problems. I think to get us to that point where there is change would require a change in Matt’s mind on governance, quite frankly. And I don’t know if that will ever happen nor does it necessarily have to. The ecosystem could change.

Jonathan: Sam, when I think about the ecosystem and to Luke’s question of like, what could actually affect the change or what could lead to growth? The heart of my ignorance here, but when it comes to FAIR, I see it as a response to a risk. I see it as a risk mitigation versus something that will actually bring like new energy and health to the project. It feels to me - and pardon my ignorance here - but it’s like a, it feels like a backup plan.

It’s like, okay. If things get worse, like a host has other options or whereas I don’t see it bringing at least from my current point of view, like new energy and health if you will to the ecosystem. I’d love to be wrong on that, but like for me right now, it feels like it’s in the camp of risk mitigation, which is on the trajectory of “let’s extend the prolonged but inevitable, let’s prolong the inevitable decline of this ecosystem.”

Sam: Yeah, it certainly starts there, right? And I think that is the starting point that was the trigger for all of this. But within FAIR, we have the ability of including multiple repositories and aggregators. We have the ability of saying, hey, maybe paid plugins can be part of this ecosystem as well, right? Something that WordPress.org may never do, right? And we can advance these features much faster than WordPress.org can because we’re not limited by Automatticians and they’re available and where their focus is, right?

And so, yes, to your point, I mean, it did result from that sort of risk management mindset, but we can expand beyond that and we own the code base. Now there’s still a lot to do to get to the point where we have a stable, 100% stable base to work from, but we’re getting there.

Jonathan: Yeah. So to that point, I think if you can create some clear commercial incentives, if the project and the plugin piece is a part of it, then that brings its own energy and health, if you will. I think that’s an important part of this is incentives. Commercial is just one of them, but it is an important incentive for the businesses that are trying to invest in the space, for instance.

The biggest problem that most products tend to have is distribution. How do you - so on the one hand, I can see this adding more nightmares to the world of product. If suddenly you have a bunch of like federated repositories and there’s all sorts of new questions that come up about reviews and support and sort of all this stuff. But if you can mitigate those things, in theory, you can offer a future where entrepreneurs, people creating products in the space have access to a wider market. So that’s something I’ll be curious to see.

Sam: Yeah. And a lot of it’s still very early days for FAIR, right? We don’t have a website, right? We don’t have any sort of marketing or any sort of direction of any kind from, the visual standpoint, end users may have heard of it, but have no idea what to do with it. And I, I would doubt that most end users have heard of it and that’s okay. Right. This is starting from an engineering standpoint. It’s starting from let’s ship some code. Right. And that was one of the things you heard from Matt at WordCamp Europe and talk.

At least they ship some code, right? At least they’re showing, putting, is what we’re going to do. Whether he agrees with it or not is a different question. But we have to get out there and start shipping some code, doing the work. And over time, you’ll see more growth within FAIR. You’ll see more contributors and you’ll see more new features, quite frankly.

Luke: Sam, thank you so much for coming on Crossword today. I have been absolutely loving reading Delta.blog and I hope you - it’s been a little while since I saw a post, so I hope another one appears there soon. Can you let listeners know where else they can find more about you?

Sam: Absolutely. So as you mentioned, I am delta.blog. I’m also at samuelsidler.com on blue sky. And that is also my website. And I’m on a lot of the other social networks, but that’s primarily where I am.

Transcript generated via Riverside and edited by Jonathan, who accepts responsibility for any mistakes.