The vast majority of revenue in the WordPress ecosystem is made by hosts other than WP.com. Everyone in the WP ecosystem benefits from increased usage, as it drives more plugins, more themes, more demand for agencies and developers, more books and tutorials about WordPress, et al. It’s all part of the virtuous cycle that has led to WP’s success so far. I’d be far more worried about the WP ecosystem if it started getting smaller and the various constituents were fighting over a shrinking pie.
For clarity, I'm not trying to make the suggestion this is about the pursuit of revenue, because I don't think that at all. My impression is that this is about survival and growth.
I've long emphasised the symbiotic relationship .org has with Automattic in positive terms. Up until fairly recently I would say this relationship was almost wholly to the benefit of the overall project. My impression is that WP.com under your leadership is now behaving more like other conventional tech companies - it's preoccupied with growth. That preoccupation with growth by implication operates in the context of wp.com competing with other commercial companies who compete for the same customers.
When I look at the success of WordPress through the years, I'm seeing growth arriving as a side effect, not as a specific end unto itself. Decisions were made because wrong or right, they seemed like a better, more powerful way to do things. When it becomes about growth, other things become a little less important. Through the lens of the need for growth, options are judged to the degree to which they are vehicles for further growth. Unfortunately this also leads to relaxing other principles that should be central to WordPress.
Before React changed its license, it had already heavily adopted for Gutenberg and Calypso and you had been poised to bless it had there not been so much turbulence. It was adopted because it had been the fastest way to move forward. The same militant zeal that was applied to 3rd party developers using non-GPL licenses was not applied to the adoption of React, because React was a useful tool in the pursuit of growth. Of course, you can say, but it's now a success story because I've no doubt that FB's change of license was influenced by WP. Community consensus was however a second order issue, as was the original licensing, what matters was what would make the people working for you happiest and most productive in the short term. (Credit to you, you were willing to abandon React at one point, that must be noted)
WordPress will soon be adopting AMP in core, given your support. Again, immediate growth will be the primary reason this happens, because AMP is the fastest way to cut down on bloat that is holding back performance for mobile users and users on slow connections. It's a shortcut, it's a shiny looking vehicle to continued growth, delivered on a plate by some of the worlds best engineers. This decision won't be made based on community consensus or a discerning look at whether it's good for the open web, or what other options there are. It will be stressed that AMP is developing web standards and is an open source initiative with many other players that have bought in, saving the web and helping poor users.
Because growth is the imperative, things that hinder growth are treated with the same baseline hostility as red tape is to businesses. Accessibility and privacy are inconvenient obstacles that ultimately need to take a backseat to building forward momentum, rather then the very means with which to democratise publishing and development.
Because growth is front and center, artificial time pressure needs to be created with which to force the issues. And like a conventional tech company that has grown into a monopoly, it starts to take advantage of its privileged position. It becomes aware of its own latitude, like now the ability to introduce a degree of breakage and concentrate all core development on the delivery of a flagship feature.
I'm seeing this and I'm thinking, many of the decisions that are being made are at best following the letter of stated principles, but not the spirit. Each decision can be somewhat rationalised and the pretense can be offered that it's in the interest of increasing the pie for everyone, or to reaching more users, general survival and for spreading OSS practices even further.
What I'm seeing is a web of monopolies that are interacting in such a way that their influence continues to grow. To have the web shaped by a few select players is not good at all, and I certainly haven't worked with WordPress all these years because I care about market share. I was motivated by the degree to which WordPress empowers people, how it brings people together and champions freedoms as well as its role in keeping the web open and independent. Now it's a slave to growth, nakedly pursuing monopoly status, boosting the role of problematic monopolies elsewhere while selectively applying its stated principles.
I have enormous, genuine respect for people working on WordPress, including you and the many people that work at Automattic and elsewhere. I believe strongly that every single person involved is working with the best intentions in mind. But the prioritisation of growth has corrupted the character of the project, and I can't express in words just how sad that makes me.
I completely agree that growth is a result, not a goal in and of itself. Fundamentally it represents what people, given the open market of all possible solutions to their problems, choose. We want to create the best software experience because that will help people choose Open Source vs proprietary solutions, which even if they don't appreciate it at the time will be better for them and the web overall in the long term.
Thank you for recognizing we were willing to walk away from React because of the license. It was chosen because of technical merit originally, but was a day or two away from delaying the entire project 6+ months to refactor.
AMP is interesting but no decision has been made there yet.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and a generally excellent comment.
