Has WordPress slightly lost its Soul?

Which is the more predictable, an empire beginning to crumble, or prophets of doom with nothing better to do announcing it?

There seems to be a rise in plaintive comments from people who put a lot of work into WordPress development, for example, here.

Also, a few glitches on wordpress.com, involving time and effort in recovery hasn’t pleased some. And the introduction by relative stealth of host-controlled Adsense - users always complaining of ad content in opposition to their expressed opinions - seemed disingenuous when Adsense for users was briefly permitted, then firmly rescinded.

“We’re a bit of an underdog,” is less true than it was. The atmosphere is of some discontent.

So what do you have the right to expect, for free…?

Probably nothing - except it’s not free. If you’ve ever designed a theme, written a plugin, or asked a pertinent forum question, you have contributed to the development of WordPress - which channels all the way to WordPress “VIP” Hosting, US$300 a month hosting fee. You’ve given and that’s the price.

Your contributions are voluntary, no-one’s forcing you to, and you know the game.

True, except the open source ethic has some subtleties which straight capitalism does not. A business plan of “primarily free, but with an expectation of secondary advantage” does muddy the waters a little.

Voluntary or not, once you accept assistance, you have acquired, if not shareholders, stakeholders, who feel entitled to make their opinions known. Yes, you can hold up for public ridicule the more inept attacks, but that is in the nature of slapstick.

And no-one ever set out on a major piece of software development with the thought - “hey, if this works, I could give it all away and remain happily obscure.”

Or should we draw a firm distinction between wordpress.com and wordpress.org?

The way .coms and .orgs were supposed to be, way back… The developers of WordPress do and don’t - yes, they do pay regard to the idea of wordpress.org as bastion of GPL freedom - for example, the discomfort expressed over sponsored themes, not unilaterally banned, but to be determined (maybe) by a user poll.

But they reserve their right to use any wordpress.org development on wordpress.com for commercial gain. With rights come responsibilities (there, it’s appeared…)

Nothing is 100%

Perhaps wordpress.com is in its early days. Blogger was fairly average in its early days - there were certainly times (North American waking hours) when getting a post up on the page was very hit and miss. Again, on acquisition, Google would and did produce the argument - “what do you have the right to demand for free?”

But Blogger became the foundation of AdWords/AdSense in its coverage of not-obviously-commercial niches, and was purchased for this pupose. Again, the plan is one step more subtle, make investment without primary return and profit by it later.

And it is all relative…

Ebay and Paypal, for examples, never had a soul to lose. There’s no burden of expectation there. You know you’re dealing with people whose sole purpose is to take as much money for as little service as possible and you deal accordingly.

As a consequence, Paypal doesn’t have an eager band of helpers, making suggestions to its codebase - and, in its PR, doesn’t have to do anything much more complicated than come! buy!

If you create a ’soul’, trade off it to an extent, you are stuck with this soul that has to be preserved. It becomes a significant part of the business presence.

Conclusions

With Freudian comments along the lines of “demand was so great, we had to increase the price” appearing, it seems some work has to be done in pacifying the stakeholders.

It is not that their concerns have been forgotten or are entirely ignored - however they have clearly dropped down the list of priorities too far for some. The pendulum has drifted slightly too far…

(I suppose we should be grateful that there isn’t yet a “public voice” of WordPress, along the lines adopted by a well-known search engine. That mixture of platitudes, necessary obfuscations and omissions seems to create more problems than it solves.)

A couple of years ago, wordpress.org did basically a bad thing ( the background is here et seq.).

Lasting damage was not done because the mistake was quickly realized and rectified, with some degree of public contrition. And also because a overwhelmingly large percentage of its users had faith in the product at that time. It may not always be so.