Lets talk about #wpdrama. Open source and business friends know I’m a strong believer that trademarks are the most underutilized lever in designing a strategy. They’re powerful, well understood mechanisms designed precisely for what many of us need: a unique brand in the market that belongs only to the business. Go read automattic.com/2024/10/02/wo…, then come back. I’ll wait. Okay, good! So here is the core design problem that Automattic faces. They created a scenario where the exclusive commercial rights to WordPress live with Automattic, while a foundation (also run by the same folks, I guess?) have the copyright and a limited ability to authorize the mark for non commercial purposes. The Wordpress community flourishes. Huge number of people in the TAM. Mostly monetized by hosting. The competition and huge community of builders pushes the SAM of Wordpress through the roof - it does everything, basically. Multiple commercial entities appear, each re-enforcing the others position. Then we get to today. Automattic and WP Engine are the two biggest players in the ecosystem. They're fighting over the same SOM, and roughly equal technology footing. Automattic invests heavily in the core software. WP Engine does not - they invest heavily in their differentiators (their hosting products, integrations with plugins, etc.) This is *very* similar to the free software island monetization strategy, in economic terms. You have a "shared upstream in a foundation" which allows multiple commercial interests to compete. In this scenario, if you have a single corporate interest contributing to the main project, the smart move is to *not* invest in the core product, and compete with them by adding to your differentation. The best example of this happened in the Hadoop ecosystem - Cloudera v Hortonworks. Cloudera won. This is what WP Engine was doing. But while WordPress *looked* like a free software island, it was actually not. Because typically those foundations hold both the copyright *and* the trademark, and in this case the trademark was split, with commercial rights belonging to Automattic. This comes as a surprise to, I think, the vast majority of the WordPress community. Because it wasn't in Automattics best interest to put it in your face, right? Grow that SAM! One WordPress! So they try and correct the competitive imbalance (where they fund a strong competitors core R&D) through encouraging contribution. WP Engine ignores this, because it's not good for their business to divert resources to do that. So Automattic escalates, and says hey - if you don't want to contribute your fair share of the core burden, feel free to pay us for the trademark and we're good. Shouting and surprise ensues. Crazy new click through buttons show up. Things get weird. Automattic and the WordPress foundation are not being great stewards here. They're changing the rules of the game to suit their taste, because they don't like how the game was going and they can. It's petulant, and it's already causing shock. WP Engine was also not a great actor. It does, in fact, suck to be the player in a market that is mostly extractive rather than collaborative. They don't have a great counter argument other than "this was fine before". It's the two players with the biggest share of the market arguing about who gets to take money from you, just in a more novel shape. I suspect that once again there is a more interesting question of how the various levers were applied, and what the interests of everyone actually were. If the goal of this design was to make Automattic the largest player in the space, they made a mistake when they created an upstream of themselves, and the community made a big mistake when they believed that upstream had rules it didn't actually have. Could Automattic be a bigger company if the WordPress community was smaller, but they had a larger total SOM? I bet the answer is yes in hindsight. (which, hey, easy enough to say, a lot harder to do) If you're wondering what you should take away as a community member, or a company evaluating your ability to build on open source technology that's absolutely core to your buiness - my advice is look for very strong trademark policies. You want absolute clarity from the jump. Otherwise, you risk being told later on that you no longer have access to the mark, and suddenly risk a very expensive litigation to find out the truth of it. Examples of strong trademark policies: * The ASF: apache.org/foundation/marks/ * Red Hat: redhat.com/en/about/trademar… * System Initiative: auth.systeminit.com/print-le… Note that all of them basically say - you can't use this mark. It belongs to us. Then it lists specific situations. Then it makes it clear that if you're in doubt, don't use the mark, or at the very least ask. If you're building your own, use modeltrademarkguidelines.org… Soft trademark policies and friendly usage helps grow a sense of community, but if you aren't actually committed to it being a mark that belongs to the community equally and fairly... you should close those marks, and let the community build their own. Or even make new marks and let *those* belong to everyone. Being clear about it is an important part of stewarding an open source community. Wordpress and Automattic weren't clear about it when it benefitted them. Competitive pressures have caused them to pull this lever in order to correct what they see as an un-balanced competitive landscape. The bummer is that folks didn't know this was their lever to pull in the first place, and the fact that they were happy to let everyone believe it wasn't the deal.

[NEWS] The Apache® Software Foundation Announces Apache Magpie, a new Top-Level Project that provides open source maintainers with platform infrastructure for agent-assisted repository maintainership buff.ly/SayRxfP #opensource #maintainer

1/5 Today we're launching the Open Source Endowment (OSE) — the world's first endowment fund dedicated to sustainably funding critical open source software. 🌱 $750K+ raised. 60+ founding donors. Built to last forever. endowment.dev 🧵

Entire government agencies are being reshaped, career experts are leaving and power is shifting — often behind closed doors. ProPublica is investigating. 🧵⬇️ (1/6)

Even news stories can have happy endings, too. @wbznewsradio

Open source lacks sustainable funding that would ensure its proper maintenance at a global scale. I've been excited to notice a potential key to this problem, which comes from similarities between OSS and top universities — the endowment model. kvinogradov.com/oss-universi…