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WordPress powers nearly half the Internet
One of the most depressing things I’ve read today. This is why we can’t have nice things.
There seems to be this very unpleasant new model of development, where companies start off as nonprofits, often employing open source or permissive licenses. Then at a certain point once they have leveraged that to scale, and they snap back permissions and licenses or close new development. Then they transfer ownership or organizational structure to be for profit.
I think it’s a really toxic and damaging approach that jeopardizes the social contract making open source software possible.
I almost feel like we need a new system for open source that examines organizational structure. An open source project that’s receiving millions in VC should not be in the same category as an open source project that’s funded on Patreon or directly by users.
Exactly, permissive licenses such as MIT allow for other people to do a rugpull and change the deal (pray I don’t alter it any further). With open source licenses the community can just fork.
That’s why I always pick AGPL for my projects. Then I can be certain that the code can be freed from greedy hands, and the actual users get all the value of the effort I put in.
VC funding really is making a deal with the devil, because you suddenly have a huge amount of cash, so the startup starts living large (hire more devs, run on expensive cloud infrastructure). But sooner or later they want their money back, plus interest; and few services are profitable, let alone that profitable. So the only thing that startups are usually capable of is to squeeze their users for all they’re worth.
Take a look at all the big startups and see:
- how long it took for them to be profitable
- how much VC funding they got until then
Companies need to pay that back and then some.
And don’t forget that VC’s see this as a perpetual investment, so your revenue must grow year after year, even if you’ve saturated the market.
Yeah, it is portfolio-padding. I see this happen all of the time. Like, I see programs and other technological products start as newborn projects. It takes 1 - 3 years average to see them blossom, they have their big break and then somewhere down the road, the creator(s) are looking for buyers. Because they’ve made this project now with the means of profit so they can live a life worry-free from all of the years they worked developing said project.
I would have expected a fork by now. A mariadb situation.
What’s stopping the users from just pushing everything to GitHub and work from there?
Nothing is stopping anyone from doing that, other than perhaps the scale.
WordPress is like 40-something% of all websites: it’s the most used blog/cms/whatever platform by a huuuuge margin.
If you wanted to fork it, you’d need pretty substantial resources, a lot of committed people, and the willingness to head a giant-ass project that has millions of users, all who want different things.
It really isn’t a trivial undertaking, if you’re serious about it.
I would, however, expect that the big providers (Flywheel, Cloudways, WPEngine, etc.) will probably make a corpo-sponsored fork sooner rather than later, since their business depends on it, and they’ve got the aforementioned money and people to do it.
Thanks! Added TimeMachiner to my feeder app.
