WordPress retaliation impacts community

I honestly have been starting to wonder if this open source business model (a for-profit company whose business model centers around being the owners and maintainers of open source projects) is the best way to fund the development of open source.

I think a vast majority of software should be open source, but I also don’t think these sorts of businesses are the best way to achieve that goal. There just ends up being too much conflict between the need to run a business and the needs of the open source project and community. They can end up downright hostile, as in this case.

I personally think the best funding model is companies who have a software need that is outside their core business to pay for their employees to work on the open source software, either full time or as part of their duties. It aligns the development of the software with the needs of the people using the software.

If a company wants more of their own needs to be addressed in the development, they can contribute more developer time to work on those things.

You are also free to fund the development effort yourself as an individual by contributing, if you want to drive development in a certain way you think is best.

I mean that problem does exist as a whole, but in this specific case this has nothing to do with some scrappy open source project not being able fund itself. Automattic is a 7.5 billion dollar company with ~800 million in rev lol.

The "giving back" angle is just smokescreen for wanting to charge more rent IMO.

That's at the heart of this discussion. There are two legal entities at play here: automatic, a for profit company, and the WordPress Foundation, a non-profit. It's believed that the latter carries independent governance over the open source project. As it turns out: that's likely not the case, and there's a potential conflict of interests.

That doesn't imply it's a bad model. Drupal is governed in a similar fashion, with safeguards in it's governance model to avoid this.

Dries Buytaert also considers the maker/taker issue, but does so from a place of, seemingly, healthy conversation.

https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem

I think the big issue is that, ultimately, a lot rides a lot rides on the character and the acumen of the foundational maintainer / creator of a FOSS project. As well as how they succeed in creating a particular perception about themselves. Sadly, the "mad king" moniker in the lwn article is kinda apt in WordPress' case after these last week's.

As for funding, I do believe companies leveraging FOSS have a moral obligation to contribute back, but that it's not the world we live in. Unless there are tangible incentives to do so, it's hardly possible to enforce this. As per Dries: promotion and visibility as a "trusted" party through the project's channels is probably the most concrete form of leverage a FOSS project has.