How to Fund the Four Freedoms? — Report from WordCamp Europe 2024

In the end, funding for open source software has to come from elsewhere. Joost and Juliette pointed to corporate responsibility. You have to think about supporting open source projects as an insurance policy, not a traditional financial investment with ROI.

• One way is the hosting tax: The idea that the hosting providers should be tasked with distributing some of the money you pay them to the people behind the code you use. (I guess hosting companies already know what code you're using, so it’s fairly trivial to implement.)
• Another way is to truly embrace open source software's role as a public good: Why not make it the role of the government to support open source software? (Earlier in the year, I watched a panel discussion about a €10 billion fund from the European Union.)

I think an important additional point is that this kind of money should go towards supporting the security and maintenance of the software, not to finance high-flying new feature ideas. In the nonprofit world, it's comparatively easy to get funding for a cool new project, but financing the day-to-day operations is nearly impossible.

A Welcoming Crowd

Being a first-timer at the event, it was nice to see some familiar faces. I’m very thankful to the WordPress Project’s Executive Director, Josepha Haden, and Robert Windisch, from CMS Garden, who did a great job introducing me to their friends in the community and social meeting places.

The event took place in two large halls within Turin’s Lingotto congress center, at the repurposed Fiat factory in the southern part of the city. One hall was filled with exhibition booths and the other with the main stage. The organizers had also made space for many tables and places to sit down. Kudos to them for that, as I have noticed many conferences lack chairs for sitting down.

Due to my tight schedule, I missed out on the Community Day, but I got to have conversations with people at the social night and in the corridors. When visiting a new community, it’s always nice to listen to people’s stories about challenges they’re trying to overcome or things that make them especially excited. Because, like in all open source communities, there is both work to do and successes to celebrate.

WordPress, A Lonely Prince

In the CMS world, I’ve noticed that there is a fair bit of Wordpress market-share envy, but size is far from everything.

With roughly 3000 participants, WordCamp Europe was a huge event. However, considering that WordPress has a 62.6% market share among CMSs, 3000 participants is only double the number of participants at DrupalCon, with Drupal’s 1.3% market share. If you compare TYPO3’s market share and the number of participants for T3CON, the number of participants at WordCamp Europe could probably have been 20 times larger.

As with all open source projects, it’s unhelpful to use the number of installations as a gauge for vital statistics like contribution volume. While WordPress has a large install base, it is still a fellow free and open source CMS, released under the GPL license, just like TYPO3. So let’s put away that measurement and take WordPress for what it is, another one of us.

It Doesn’t Have to Mean Open Source Success

In fact, WordPress is probably more well-known to the world than the Four Freedoms behind open source software. For many plugin businesses, WordPress has become a platform for their software, rather than a blogging or content management platform.

Because of the broad install base and easy installation process, selling access to WordPress-compatible software has become big business — taking the focus away from open source contribution. Many people probably don’t know that both WordPress (a free download) and the plugins (that they pay for) are open source software. While I think paying developers for their work is only right and proper, this could indicate that quick and easy access to a paid plugin ecosystem will reduce the motivation to work on the system itself.

While some are very open about their product’s open source nature, other plugin vendors seem less inclined to tout the fact. When talking with WordPress contributors at WordCamp Europe, I got the impression that they recognize WordPress’ immense success as both a blessing and a curse to its open source nature.

WordPress UX Isn’t Quirky Enough

Events like WordCamp Europe are great for strengthening the collaboration between our free and open source content management systems. It is also a chance for some comparative anthropology, where I study the differences between the projects and get a chance to reflect on my own culture, the TYPO3 project.

Like Drupal, but unlike TYPO3, WordPress still has the founder playing an active decision-making role in the project. In the WordPress world, that person is Matt Mullenweg. It was interesting to hear people in the community use the term benevolent dictator about him, and he seems to be using versions of the term himself, too. In contrast, my impression is that the Drupal community and their project founder, Dries Buytaert, is avoiding the term in favor of Project Lead.

Listening to Matt’s keynote, it also seemed more prescriptive (telling how things should be) than the instructional (this is how we can do this together) tone of Dries Buytaert’s Driesnote. Maybe it’s just the words we use, or maybe WordPress has the most top-down governance structure of the three CMSs?

It was refreshingly different to hear Matt talk about how WordPress’s user interface isn’t quirky enough and how he would love to see more easter eggs. Will we ever see TYPO3’s Core Team leader Benni Mack or the TYPO3 Company CEO, Daniel Fau, go on stage at T3CON or the Developer Days, asking questions like: “How do we unlock people who are contributing […] so that we can do some weird and funky stuff?” Is TYPO3 just too boringly enterprise-focussed or should we also make sure editors enjoy the UX with both hemispheres of their brains?

Did You Say Enterprise?

Most CMS people I speak to outside of the WordPress community define the platform as non-enterprise, more than anything else. Indeed, the platform’s success comes from great popularity among less technical users, who build smaller, simpler websites. However, that doesn’t mean there are no professional WordPress agencies. Here too, the large numbers may create a statistical disadvantage.

WordPress is used by many businesses that you would consider enterprise. It’s used by both disney.com and nasa.gov.

Although many WordPress diehards will admit that WordPress and enterprise aren’t necessarily synonyms, enterprises that choose WordPress do it for editor-experience reasons. In the recent Drupal-to-WordPress migration of nasa.gov, the content authoring environment was cited as one of the reasons for the move. It is worth noting that businesses prioritize editor experience as much or more than modern code standards, well-designed database schema, or even performance-at-scale arguments.

And it may be a sign of different times that I heard the event’s name being discussed. Maybe my next WordPress event won’t be a WordCamp, but the more professional-sounding WordCon?