Is WordPress At It’s Core A Real Open Source Project In 2024?
Discover the truth in 2024: Is WordPress genuinely open source? Explore its core origins and prospects now. With special guest Baldur Bjarnason.
Delve into the heart of WordPress in 2024 and explore its true essence as an open-source project. Discover the evolution of this platform over the years and analyze if it still upholds the principles of transparency, collaboration, and community-driven development. Join us in uncovering whether WordPress remains an open-source project at its core today.
#1 – Baldur, what are some critical elements of an “open-source” project in 2024?
#2 – What are an established OS project’s most significant challenges when dealing with legacy code?
#3 – How effectively can an OS project deal with the problem of management by committee, or is this a real problem or just ongoing propaganda?
#4 – What do you see personally as WordPress’s most significant challenges and opportunities in 2024?
#5—How do you see AI changing online business, including your own, in the next 18 months?
#6—If you had your time machine (H. G. Wells) and could travel back to the beginning of you?
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The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:01:08.640] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back to the WP tonic this week in WordPress and SaaS. We’ve got a great guest here. We’ve got Baldur Bjarnason. I’m butchered his name, but he’s used to it, and I’ve done a superb job of that tribe, but you’re used to that. We’re going to be talking about all things WordPress. Is WordPress an open-source project? What is an open-source project? We will be delving into this fascinating subject, and Folder has a lot of experience in open-source projects and WordPress itself. I’ve also got my co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the audience?
[00:02:01.070] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, sure. My name is Kurt von Ahnen. I own a company called MananaNoMas. We focus primarily on membership and learning websites, and I work directly with the folks at WP-Tonic and the great folks at Lifter LMS.
[00:02:12.880] – Jonathan Denwood
And we got Bolder. Would you like to introduce yourself to the choice quickly?
[00:02:18.790] – Baldur Bjarnason
I would like to. The problem with being old and middle-aged is that introductions if they were supposed to be faithful, would take forever. The short version is that I’ve been doing this since the first website was probably made in, I think, ’96 or ’97, so it’s getting there. However, in terms of the open source and WordPress experience, I’m currently a consultant and freelancer, but before I switched over to that, I was working for open education and not-for-profit organizations and working quite a bit with, for example, outfits like Pressbooks, which uses WordPress heavily in an open education context. And for the past few years, most of my work has been in either open education or open source sectors. But post-COVID, like with many, things changed a bit. I’m working more as a freelancer as people need.
[00:03:41.240] – Jonathan Denwood
But you have been a long-term contributor to the core WordPress?
[00:03:47.760] – Baldur Bjarnason
No, not to the core WordPress. I’m a long-term user and have been working closely with people who have contributed. I’m the guy who helps out people who do that work. For example, we’re doing the press box thing, and even though I wasn’t actually working on the core press with the project, quite a few of my responsibilities involved making things possible for them in terms of integrations with other projects. So, there is quite a bit of API work, plugins, and that thing. Currently, most of my WordPress work is on the plugin side. I’m currently working on a project with a UK-based company to integrate their API into WordPress websites. The simplest way to do that is by using plugins. So it’s a bit eclectic. It’s a bit mixed.
[00:05:01.970] – Jonathan Denwood
You got a fair bit of experience. So it should be a great discussion before we go into the meat and potatoes of this great interview. I’ve got a couple of messages from our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. Coming back, folks. I want to point out we’ve got a great list of the best WordPress plugins, plus some special offers from the sponsors. Plus, you can sign up for the WP-Tonic newsletter, a weekly newsletter of the best WordPress stories and tech stories. You can get all these goodies by going over to WP wp-tonic. Com/deals, WP-tonic.com/deals, and you can get all the goodies there by WordPress Drive. What more could you ask for? Probably a lot more, but that’s all What are you going to get from that page? Sorry to disappoint. I’ve made a career of it. So let’s go straight in. So what do you see as some of the critical elements of an actual open source project? Is it totally just based on the license on which the software is being built? Or are there more elements to an actual open-source project, in your opinion, Alder?
[00:06:36.840] – Baldur Bjarnason
I mean, yeah, there has to be more to it than the license. It’s so easy to create a software project that technically follows the license to a letter but breaks every spirit of it. And specifically, one risks with open source projects is that they become effectively proprietary code that nobody else is able to modify in a meaningful way because there’s so many external factors, whether it’s organizational, financial, or just in terms of comprehending the code that prevents other people from contributing it. Honestly, I think that’s one of the concerns that people like me who have been quite involved with open source and open education. The concern with WordPress is that it’s effectively turning into a shared-source company more than a trustworthy open-source one. It’s just that it’ll be something entirely driven by WordPress. Com and Gutenberg development a theme specifically, and everybody else will find it harder and harder to influence the strategic and overall direction of the project. You might be able to fix individual issues, and If you’re making a theme or a plugin, you might be able to tweak and fix specific bugs that affect those projects.
[00:08:22.510] – Baldur Bjarnason
But in terms of affecting the overall direction, what is WordPress and where is it going and who is it for? If it hasn’t already, then in the long term, I think it’s going to be dominant entirely by wordpress. Com and the Good Work team, and specifically by Matt himself. It’s always been an issue with open source or the whole benevolent dictator for life. The idea that there’s a single tyrant or like, benevolent dictator that directs the path of the project, that you could turn Tire into, or they could like, switch to a more democratic way of working. But Matt has always, in the past, he and WordPress have tried- Can I interrupt?
[00:09:24.130] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m not being rude, but I think we need to lay out some bigger elements before we go into the way Matt runs things or does. You said the spirit of open source, that if something technically meets the requirements of the license. It can still be judged as not being truly open source because it’s not a hearing to the spirit. What is In your mind, what is this spirit part of the equation that you would utilize to judge a truly open source project? I think I wasn’t being rude in interrupting you, but I just felt that we need to clarify what the reasonably quickly, maybe 2-3 key points around this term of spirit that you utilized at the beginning.
[00:10:32.640] – Baldur Bjarnason
That’s actually a very good question. At the core one, the absolute prime one, would be community participation in the direction of the project, both the development and the direction. As in It’s not dictated by a single company or even a small group of company, but it’s inclusive of people in the community as well. And that includes both users and and people who have built their livelihoods around it. So community is a big thing, and that’s what has always been the strength of WordPress. It’s got massive, massive community. It’s And that’s what took WordPress global more than anything else. And that is at the heart of the issue is the fact that it has to come from a plurality of people rather than a single company or organization, because people within a company are replaceable. They’re human resources that are just swapped out. But community is more Open source is a more organic thing that forms around a project. And that’s what defines open source as the community. Or to be specific, if you want to go for the whole hippie free software definition, that’s what defines free software versus open source, because the term open source was originally coined specifically to define a path to just get the- I need to interrupt again before I throw over it to Kurt, is I totally understand understand what you’ve just said, but the problem in my mind, and I’m not basing this as a criticism of what you’ve just said, because much of what you’ve just stated, I totally agree with.
[00:12:46.080] – Jonathan Denwood
But my only problem is, if you just say it’s community, that’s a bit to my heart, it’s a little bit vague, isn’t it, still, saying it’s based on community, because one person’s concept of what community is can be totally different to other person’s idea of what community is.
[00:13:10.190] – Baldur Bjarnason
Yeah. So do you want me to give examples?
[00:13:16.130] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, that would be helpful because this is tricky, but I do know there’s been a number. I don’t know if you would agree with this, This tricky situation isn’t just specifically for WordPress. There’s been a number of high visible open source projects that have had to deal with this subject, and some have dealt with it by collapsing, others have overcome and moved on. So it’s very diverse about how particular open source projects deal with this. But my research on it seems to suggest that it’s not that uncommon. So first of all, what’s your thought on that? And then maybe you can give a quick example.
[00:14:19.180] – Baldur Bjarnason
Yeah. So one of the issues is, if we want to be specific in our terminology, there are several different kinds of open source. The first kind would be the one that is essentially open source by commercial or distribution need, like MONGODB. It’s made It’s contained by a single company. It’s effectively just using open source basically for the distribution to reach their customers and as a marketing thing. Whether they switch away from a technical open source license or not is probably irrelevant to them because they aren’t really using open source as in terms of what either the Free Software Foundation or the open source consultant intended, which is that they have specific goals. One is to use the crowd or or a plurality of higher visibility into code to improve code quality, the Bazaar model, which is what was the goal with the Open Source Consortium. The Free Software Foundation, their goal is about establishing free agents for the users. When you’re using just for purely for as a commercial endeavor, you don’t really need either one of those things. You could use just a shared source license to do so. That’s what’s happening is that a lot of the companies are switching to basically the licensing that more reflects the old way that Unix, before Linux, before BST used to be distributed.
[00:16:13.450] – Baldur Bjarnason
It It needs to be distributed as source code because it was a given that you’d need the source code to be able to properly deploy the software in your environment. It’s a purely functional thing. We’re getting a lot of companies that started off as a broader open source. All free software companies are switching to the shared source model. That’s closed in spirit, but open in terms of that, you can actually read the code because as a response to the cloud hosting issue where things like Amazon Web Services can basically take your code and provide their own services without paying to do anything. These companies were implementing a lot of work and code without getting paid for it from their perspective. If your motivation is purely commercial, then obviously that means that the open source or free software is not doing the job for you. So they switch. It’s a logical thing from their perspective. There’s a second type of open source project which is similar to Ruby on Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails exists as a positive externality in the ways what economists call it, as in they made this to build their own products, but they make it open source because that both spreads those ideas for how to make software, it opens up that code to more eyeballs, but it’s not required for their core product.
[00:18:01.120] – Baldur Bjarnason
It’s like they benefit from it, but they could close it off if they wanted to without actually impacting their own product. It’s community participation without But the community doesn’t really direct the project because that’s one of the controversies with Ruby on Reels is that the Reels core, and specifically, Base Camp, tend to make decisions unilaterally that affect all of the people who are using the project. So it’s not community-directed. Then the third example, which is what I would have classified WordPress traditionally, which is that it’s made by and for the communities. The WordPress community has, quite often in the past, had a big influence in where things were going. When Then wordpress. Com would try to… Like with the initial release in Gutenberg, the pushback in terms of accessibility there is not something that would have happened with a project that was more directed by the single core company. The fact that that happened, the The fact that that had an effect and resulted in extensive work since then to try and improve the accessibility was evidence that WordPress was, at least at that time, a community-directed project. Those would be the three different kinds, which is essentially entirely commercial, partially commercial, but benefits the community.
[00:19:57.110] – Baldur Bjarnason
And the third one is that it’s primarily community, but benefits the commercial companies involved.
[00:20:04.400] – Jonathan Denwood
Thank you so much. I think that was really very helpful. I want to throw it over to Kurt now and move it on to the next question because we only got a limited amount at the time. You have to come back. No, these are not simple concepts, are they? No.
[00:20:23.320] – Kurt von Ahnen
The more I have these conversations about open source, especially with these other that Jonathan introduces through the show, the more confused I get about open source, just to be honest with everybody that’s listening. When I hear of the community running the show, I immediately have flashbacks to custom themes with all kinds of weird functions and lockouts and the classic editor baked in and a customer comes to me and this thing’s a mess. And I think to myself, well, a theme should be appearance and a plugin should be function. And that’s the way that my head works. And when community gets to run with the ball freely, I think sometimes things get weird. But beyond all that, if we go to the next question and I say, making open source and then having it last 20 years, and then some, what do you think of these biggest challenges when we look at things like legacy code and making sure that everything works forever?
[00:21:26.630] – Baldur Bjarnason
Yeah, I mean, you could I literally talk about, I write the entire doctorate thesis on these. And people literally do that. If you’re there, you can go on archive. Org. And There’s going to be papers and essays there on this topic. They haven’t found a single answer. But the problem in terms of WordPress, specifically, is that it was idiosyncratic to begin with. Wordpress, the way it handles quite a few things, has never been exactly normal. It’s not been entirely mainstream PHP, MySQL handling. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but it’s always been a little bit different. And that makes things complicated, uniquely complicated for WordPress. And it’s a It’s a complicated problem to begin with. And then you have the issue with web projects, where there’s this massive changes in the web browser as a platform itself that itself has added huge capabilities where things that took you hundreds of lines of code to do something in the front-end now might be a single line of CSS. It’s also a question of where do you draw the line? How far back do you want to support? Also how far into the future? You might discover that you can’t do both at the same time.
[00:23:15.850] – Baldur Bjarnason
If you’re going to update a code base for the long term, you might have to leave people behind. People don’t like being left behind. They really… Yeah. Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer to that, unfortunately.
[00:23:39.790] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, because my observation is very tricky. There’s been other CRMs, other open-source projects that have handled this tricky not very well, and it’s outside observation. It’s damaged the project. But on the other hand, being a total slave to backward compatibility, I think it has its own drawbacks and problems with that. We’ve been able to really concentrate on moving a project forward in utilizing the most modern technology and just Just the technical baggage of trying to keep backward compatibility. It makes a complicated project even more complicated. Would you agree with that?
[00:24:41.940] – Baldur Bjarnason
Yeah. I mean, there’s actually two good examples from the closed-source world, Windows versus macOS. Windows loves supporting everything that has ever touched the Windows platform from the beginning of time. It’s absolutely mind boggling achievement that they still have the level of backwards compatibility that they do. Mac OS breaks everything, not quite everything, but they keep breaking things in updates because they don’t care. They’re like, whatever. If you’re old software that gets broken, old laptops, like my mother tried to update an old MacBook Air the other day, and she didn’t manage to reach me in time before doing it because I would have told her not to, but it’s dead in the water now, so I need to figure out a way to resurrect it. But those are the two biggest examples of those two different approaches in our current computing. Depending on your goals, either one is equally valid. But I think we can agree that both have massive downsides and seem to add… It’s just the The biggest difference between the two is who ends up doing the work. On the back of us, the integrators, the third-party app developers, and…
[00:26:11.170] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, he didn’t pay for it. Oh, he’s back again. He’s coming back, folks. He said some stuff. Oh, you’re coming back. You cut off completely there. I’m going to have to bring you back into the… There you go, you got cut off completely there.
[00:26:25.820] – Baldur Bjarnason
Where did I end?
[00:26:28.590] – Jonathan Denwood
You When we’re talking about Mac and how they move the technical overhead to the third-party people.
[00:26:36.920] – Baldur Bjarnason
Yeah. The difference between two approaches is basically who ends up doing the work. On the Mac OS, it’s the third-party software developers, it’s the users, it’s anybody who’s trying to extend the system on Windows. They’ve taken on a lot of that work themselves, and a lot of the work ends up being on Microsoft or on driver drivers as developers. I think the same thing could be applied, for example, to WordPress and other open-source projects is that, do you want to preserve the work of all of your extension or plugin developers all of your ecosystem? Do you want to shift the work over to them, or do you want to take it on yourself? But if the core project is going to take it on, they need the money, they need resources.
[00:27:29.810] – Jonathan Denwood
When it comes to the WordPress, my observation is you’ve got a situation where it’s the worst of both worlds, because a lot of the overhead is on the third parties, yet it still wants total compatibility to the back. So that’s my quick observation with that. I just want to comment before we go for our break. Would you say that Going back to your three examples of what our open source project can be. I’m sure there’s a host of other different flavors, but the three that you outlined, I thought you did an excellent job. Would you agree with me that WordPress, it’s only my own observation that it has attempted to move from example three 3 to example 2, which was the Ruby Reels example. There’s been a real attempt to really move it to that Ruby on Reels example. Would you agree with that?
[00:28:44.200] – Baldur Bjarnason
Yes. I think that’s actually core part of a lot of the controversies and the tension that exists among that, at least I’ve witnessed and heard from in the WordPress community, is At least there’s the feeling among some users and developers that this is the case. Of course, it’s impossible to know whether that’s the actual strategy or direction because we can’t read the minds of the people involved. But it’s certainly what it looks like from the outside to a lot of people. I think it’s the responsibility is on the the people who are directing the WordPress project today to clarify what’s going on and to make sure that everybody understands what is the project trying to become Because it’s like as soon as you just say out, right, well, if you want to change something, then as soon as you tell people about it, then that makes a lot of the things quite a bit easier and less I totally agree with you.
[00:30:02.180] – Jonathan Denwood
I know we need to go for a break, but I just want to add this other reflection and see if you agree with it. It’s probably driven by business, but could it also be driven that you had a base of developers that were you used to use in PHP, but the technical change, the major… You’re also going a major technical change that’s understandable in some ways to utilize in modern JavaScript and JavaScript libraries like React, and that had a consequence as well. Can you see where I’m coming from?
[00:30:50.340] – Baldur Bjarnason
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if it had a role to play somewhere in the decision making. It’s extremely hard, though, for on the outside to guess just how much of a role. But I’m sure it was there, at least, at the very least, an item on the meeting, if there was a meeting. So probably at least in part.
[00:31:17.490] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, more so the technology drove partially a decision because the bulk of your contributors haven’t got the technical or the experience experience in a particular new road, a new pathway. So you’re going to look at more internal resources to supply the technical base. But you don’t want to lose the feeling of community. So you want both things at the same time, and that’s why it becomes a bit of a hot mess, doesn’t it?
[00:31:53.930] – Baldur Bjarnason
Yeah, I think that’s an entirely plausible theory about how things stand. Yeah, it could be.
[00:32:04.020] – Jonathan Denwood
We delved in some deep subjects. I think we’ve done a reasonable stop. It’s been to the quality that I thought it was going to be the conversation. I don’t think you would hear this conversation on a lot of podcasts. We’ve got a great second half. We’re going to go for our break. We’ve got a couple more quick messages from our sponsors I really appreciate it. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I want to point out, if you’re looking at a great hosting partner, especially in the learning management, membership, and buddy-boss area, why don’t you look at becoming a WP Tonic partner? We’ve got some fantastic packages for you, the WordPress professional. You can learn all about our great packages and how we support you by going over to WP-tonic. Com/partners, wp-tonic. Com/partners, and find out. We love to be your technical partner in these type of projects. So on we go. I’m going to throw it over to Kirk, over to you again, Kirk.
[00:33:32.110] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, this question hits me because I think as an agency, when I deal with a client, I prefer to have a single point of contact. If I’m an agency and I’m signing into a multi-person Zoom call to get six opinions before I change the heading or the image on the home page, I’ve got a nightmare on my hands. And I think about WordPress and the 43 % of the Internet that it is, and the huge community in mass that it must be. And then I think about the most vocal people at the top of the community and some of the unhinged things I see on X and things like that that they post. And so I come to this question lightly, but in all seriousness, how effectively can an open source project actually be managed by a committee? Who picks that committee? And is this a real problem or is this just hyperbole that gets blown out of shape?
[00:34:33.620] – Baldur Bjarnason
I mean, it’s a real problem because it is. It’s like anybody who’s attempted to… I did quite a bit of work being a representative of a not-for-profit at the W3C, working on standardization, which is probably the definition of of committee work. Politeness prevents me from using the language that is the most- He’s never taught me.
[00:35:13.980] – Jonathan Denwood
He’s never thought me.
[00:35:15.840] – Baldur Bjarnason
But it’s quite possibly the worst way to do anything, but it’s also, in that context, the only way to do anything. So you’re doomed to suffer there. The committee work tends to work best if you know exactly what it is that you need to be doing, like the exact design. You can see this in standardization work, like on the W3C, that when they are taking something that’s already been implemented by web browsers and they’re just defining and clarifying the edge cases and making sure that everybody throws the same error at the same time, they can work really well. But again, looking at the W3C, when they’ve been designing their standards from scratch before implementation It’s been a disaster every single time. X HTML 2, for example, it just never went anywhere. Loads of interesting ideas, but never-It’s all very interesting. Yeah, but never went Anyway, the same thing that when you get back to open source projects, there you basically have two options. You can either go really, really slow and do things by committee and make sure everybody is on board and there’s a consensus.
[00:36:51.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Can I say something here? I actually disagree with you quite passionately.
[00:36:57.060] – Baldur Bjarnason
Okay, go on.
[00:36:58.050] – Jonathan Denwood
I think this This argument of committee is used as a bit of a red heron because there obviously is a lot of truth to it, but that’s why we have representative democracy in a lot of areas. Basically, you can have a committee, but you just make sure there’s one person or small team that actually runs things. And you just have a committee, just like In a balanced public company, you have a CEO, you have a chief financial officer, but you have a steering committee, and that committee are not involved in the day-to-day running of the business. That is not their purpose. Their purpose is outside or should be. Obviously, this fails in a lot of… But a true steering committee should be of people that have the experience and the credos and the ability to stand up to a CEO or some of the other individuals. If they’re doing something blatantly wrong or could damage the company medium to long term. I don’t see anything different in an open source project where you have a steering committee, but you give people four or five years to actually run it. I see it as a completely red hair in this argument in some ways.
[00:38:40.850] – Baldur Bjarnason
It depends on Like you said, you talk specifically about a steering committee, and it depends on where in the process the committee lies, where in the process the group collaborative decision-making resides. When it’s a problem, like I was describing earlier, that usually means that the committee is right there on some vital crossroads, and decided is we’re probably shouldn’t, and we’re probably should be on a higher level, deciding direction strategy rather than the individual actions. That’s probably one way of making a distinction between the two. But the problem in that in open source is that, generally speaking, open source is managed by whoever shows up. So it’s making sure that there are specific roles and specific hierarchies and specific structures can be a lot of work to both make sure it’s in place and make sure that people are actually following it because sometimes they can’t be done for free, basically. Yeah, it’s work, it costs money. That it costs money means you need a parent organization of some sorts, and you need a revenue model, somebody needs to be profiting from the whole endeavor. I mean, the answer would then seem to be that it can be done, but it’s very tricky.
[00:40:25.510] – Baldur Bjarnason
It can easily go wrong. But specifically to what Kurt mentioned in that, having a single contact point, having something that call… Some person that coordinates is vital, no matter what model you use, especially with outside work, is that outsiders can’t… People who stand outside an organization can’t be expected to navigate the internal structure of the organization to be able to collaborate with them. That applies both with corporations and with open source organizations. You need some coordination point, somebody who takes care of them, takes that matter internally and passes it on. It’s called structure.
[00:41:18.780] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s called proper governance and structure, isn’t it?
[00:41:23.180] – Baldur Bjarnason
Not all companies have that, and not all open source companies have that.
[00:41:26.850] – Jonathan Denwood
No. The other thing It’s not on our list. The other thing that I’ve been accused of it, and other people, is that if you don’t contribute to core on one of the Asiri projects around WordPress, that you haven’t got the right to say If you’re not doing anything about it. I think that’s absolute shit, myself. Basically, and it’s another technique, I’m not going I’m very passionate about WordPress, and I want the best for it, but I’m not working for MacMalmaison for free. I’m just not going to do it. Not when he wants to move, in my opinion, from the example of number three to the example of number two. And some people would say it’s getting to the stage where it’s in version one you showed, but I don’t think that would be fair. I think it, but I definitely, in my opinion, it’s moving to example two in the first half of this interview that you so clearly outlined. I’m just not prepared. It doesn’t mean I’m not passionate, and I don’t want the best for WordPress, but I’m just not going to contribute. And I think asking individuals to contribute a lot of time to something like that, or even companies where you have no real is pushing it a bit, what would your response be?
[00:43:05.250] – Baldur Bjarnason
Well, one of my early jobs at a college was at a fairly traditional software company that had a Back in those days, had an actual department just for testing. And they were amazing at their job. They had such a talent for finding and pointing out problems that it was just awe-inspiring, but they had no talent in it because that’s not their job. The ability to spot a problem, describe it, and describe what needs to be done is not the same as the ability to actually do it. Those are two separate skills. As soon as you shut down critiques for not contributing, you are basically shutting off what the most important sources of information a project can have. Because people have expertise that’s relevant for finding and discovering problems that may the fixing, but they wouldn’t have the first clue on actually how to do the fixing because that’s a different skill. So I think it’s extremely short-sighted to demand. So basically, it’s just a tactic to shut down criticism because you don’t want to do the work, in my opinion.
[00:44:17.920] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m going to throw over again to, I think we’re on question four, Kurt.
[00:44:23.660] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, yeah. And that one is not just in community or governance or those things, but When you think of WordPress as a whole, when you think of WordPress as a whole environment, what do you think are the most… Both sides, what are the most significant challenges, but also what are the most significant opportunities that we see in the space in 2024?
[00:44:47.700] – Baldur Bjarnason
I mean, one of the most interesting opportunity would be the changes in the social media landscape, both in terms of two different open and federated integrated protocols appearing, Blue Sky and the Activity Pub or Masterdon. Wordpress is its own thing, but it so frequently has to interact or integrate with other social media platforms. I think it has a huge opportunity there to figure out new ways of integrating with these social media platforms that weren’t possible with the closed ones. So you can actually change completely the equation for how somebody’s e-commerce site or a company’s website interacts with their social media presence on these platforms. I think that’s a very, very interesting opportunity that there’s a lot of potential innovation there and untested ideas that could be tried out. So I think there’s people in the WordPress community already trying things to design it. So I think that’s a big opportunity. And the challenge is basically everything else, the world. Just look at this state of the world. I don’t even need to go into any specifics. It’s just so many things that are just… Because it’s like you need to exist in the world. You need to exist in the community and with your local government and your local economy.
[00:46:32.960] – Baldur Bjarnason
And if everything around you is having problems, then that’s going to be a problem for you. So I think that you could say probably that challenge is probably applies to all of us everywhere, no matter what we’re doing. So that’s not specific to WordPress. But I think a specific challenge to WordPress is to figure out why… Like, does it want to become the CMS monopoly or oligopoly on the Web? Is that a good thing? It’s like, would WordPress be improved by actually focussing on deliberately having a smaller market share and serving a smaller market share better instead of this ambition of just constantly becoming a bigger and bigger share of the web? I think that’s that question, figuring out an answer to that question because I don’t think it… I don’t think it’s anybody’s consciously thought, should we dial down the market share? But I think that question is probably the biggest challenge that’s specific to the WordPress project. Is it too big? Is it already too big? Does it need to be smaller for everybody involved? I don’t know.
[00:47:53.630] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’ve got a follow-up question in this, and it’s more about global perspectives because Jonathan and I are captured here in the United States, and there’s a lot of feel that WordPress is a United States product. I mean, there’s just no getting around that, right? And a lot of the community that tries to drive the influence is here in the United States. But when I speak to people that I work with overseas, they seem completely disconnected from some of the nonsense that’s a distraction over here in the States. What do you think is your perception of WordPress as an American product versus WordPress as a global product? Is that even a fair question?
[00:48:34.980] – Baldur Bjarnason
I think it is. Like, for example, I go to… Iceland is a lot of family-oriented activities. Our idea of the close family is probably closer to the Mediterranean one where we’re at distance our aunts and uncles and cousins. We do a lot of family gatherings and meetups with There’s quite a large amount, a large number of people on them. And whenever I talk about working on the web, invariably people mention WordPress. If anybody has worked on an institution or organization or company that has a marketing presence on the net, it’s probably WordPress. And it’s their entry point into the back-end of the web, of how the web functions. And like you say, I don’t think the US or the English language community’s issues in WordPress, I don’t think that registers with those groups and those users much, if at all. They complain about some of the consequences, like Gutenberg. If you speak to somebody who works in marketing and has been forced to switch to Gutenberg and they don’t like it, they will talk about it ad infinitum, which is not exactly fun when you’re at somebody’s 70th birthday party and trying to get distracted and not thinking about work.
[00:50:17.330] – Baldur Bjarnason
And then you meet somebody, a relative or a cousin who just talks about WordPress all the time. But yeah, no, there is definitely this, especially Especially with global open source project, this decentralized nature means that each country, its language, tends to see a different slice of the overall community. I think that’s probably a good thing, but there is, though, the sense that if you speak to Icelandic users of WordPress, most of them will say they have no control over the project. They don’t feel they have a voice anywhere that can reach or influence any of the decision making the project. So they both feel disconnected from the drama. So they probably don’t even know about the drama or the politics, but they also feel disconnected from the decision making and the overall strategy. So it’s a bit of a six of one, half a dozen of the other situation.
[00:51:23.670] – Kurt von Ahnen
Nice. Thank you so much for the feedback, Jonathan. I’m going to pass it to you and I’ve got to run to my other call.
[00:51:28.580] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes. Kirk’s got to go off to a previous. For our question, I think everything we’ve discussed during this podcast is, I’ve used this term a few times, a witches’ brew, but the catalyst is the Gutenberg project. And we’re almost six years into it. It has only 200 with full-site editing themes It’s a figure that I was exposed, it still only has about 200,000 active. If that is not classified as a failure, I really don’t know how you could classify that. I wanted it to… I’m still very pro-Gutenberg, the actual idea, because WordPress really, to be effective, it really needed to improve the editor experience, and just relying on third-party solutions, totally, I didn’t feel was appropriate. But I publicized it through Twitter. I was watching a quick video from Paul, from WP Tuts, who’s not an enormous lover of Gutenberg, but he’s a very fair and honest individual, in my experience. And he did a review of the upcoming update. And when you look at the UX, the usability in UX of native Gutenberg, in my opinion, it’s a dog’s breath. And it’s getting worse, and this is only my opinion. The reason why it’s getting worse is that they’re not really dealing with the UX and usability, or the usability and UX mess they’ve got.
[00:53:38.300] – Jonathan Denwood
And they’re adding more and more functionality with every update, and it’s making the usability and UX flaws even worse because they’re adding even more complexity to it. So on that side… And their argument, and one of the argument is used, is the reason why the usability actually use in the interface and UX design is really, in my opinion, quite crummy, is it’s an open source project. I refute that completely. I think it’s a load of bullshit by itself. What’s your views of what I’ve just outlined?
[00:54:19.650] – Baldur Bjarnason
I think blaming the nature of the project, open source, on saying that it’s saying that It’s the nature of the project’s fault that they might not have good user experiences. I mean, it doesn’t make sense even on the face of it because of how centrally controlled Gutenberg specifically is. It’s not managed like an open-source project. It’s centrally managed. So they should easily be able to bypass, if that were true, because I don’t accept that it’s true to begin with. But even if that were true, that this was a all always a problem with open-source projects, Gutenberg is specifically structured to be able to bypass that problem. They should be able to design a cohesive, thought-out experience for the editing interface because they are this separate cluster of a project that is much smaller and should be easier to manage for For this, specifically. But I think it’s clear to say that Gutenberg works for fewer people than it’s supposed to. I think that’s a diplomatic way of saying it. If it was supposed to work for everybody who uses WordPress, then it’s obviously a failure because it doesn’t. It just plain doesn’t work for anybody who needs to use WordPress.
[00:56:04.760] – Baldur Bjarnason
I think even in some of the integrations I’ve worked on, it’s caused problems because of the opaque relationship between the editing user interface and the actual HTML that’s output, it tends to, has in some cases made a few integrations a bit more complicated than they would have otherwise. I think it’s solvable, but it makes things more complicated. And as soon as things are more complicated, like you say, they tend to be harder to use. They tend to be more error prone. There tends to be more that goes wrong. And I mean, the sad fact is that this was probably avoidable if it had been properly managed from the start. So it was a bit of a missed opportunity. This could have been a much, much bigger deal, like bigger, positive deal than it was.
[00:56:59.390] – Jonathan Denwood
The people Well, you might disagree with the way they are running things, and there might be some personality clashes. Some people really hate my guts. It doesn’t really bother me that much. Not because I’m a sociopath, but I just accept I’m not everybody’s cup of tea. It doesn’t make them terrible. There’s other people that I think are total sociopaths. So I’m not much I’m much bothered what a sociopath thinks of me. But these people aren’t idiots that are running this project. They’re much sharper people than me. I’m just an average guy. They’re much brighter than me. They must be aware of the UX and usability problems, because when you watch that video from Paul, it’s a sad state of affairs, really. Why can’t I get to grips with it? Or is it that they don’t eat? There’s so much in the bubble, they don’t even realize it is a problem?
[00:58:09.190] – Baldur Bjarnason
It might be like… It’s possible that the answer is different for every single one of them. But one common thing I’ve encountered is the fact that the extremely smart programmer types, they tend to find complexity easy to manage and navigate. So they don’t experience… There’s a class of user experience problems that they aren’t sensitive to because they They’re like, Yeah, that isn’t the problem. I just need to do that, that, that, that, that People have different needs, not smart, but people who have specific cognitive skill sets of being able to reason about specific kinds of problems. They have different needs from user interfaces from people who have a different training. I think that coders, specifically, are a very, very bad benchmark for… They themselves, generally, are not able to see most user experience problems because they just have a completely different way of thinking about how they use their software tools than 90% of the population. So they probably don’t feel that. They probably don’t see these problems to the same extent as everybody else does.
[00:59:54.660] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m only surmising this, and I have no facts to support this. But do you think it’s also Matt and some of the key people in Automatic, they have a programming background. Do you think that their real focus is on the quality of the development team, and they totally, it might be not consciously, but subconsciously, totally, I’m struggling for the right word because reduce the value of UX and user disability in the actual project. There’s a blind spot there to some degree.
[01:00:42.330] – Baldur Bjarnason
I don’t know. I mean, it’s very hard to guess at people’s motivations, or you can only just look at what they do. And it’s obvious that what WordPress has been doing with Gutenberg is not putting the same a priority on user experience as you’d think was sensible for the project.
[01:01:06.360] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s a bit of a contradiction, isn’t it? Even by utilizing his and his team, his key members of his team, public statements, because they want this all embracing. So you think usability, if you match it to the public statements, you think that would be a core? But when you look at the end product, there’s a total mismatch, isn’t It might be that they simply don’t have the skillset because UX design is not just…
[01:01:39.800] – Baldur Bjarnason
Actually, quite often you need a level of… If you want to recruit world-class designers, you sometimes… It’s not… One of the things that makes it easier to recruit world-class designers is having some design skill yourself. To be able to spot when somebody actually is likely to be good contribution versus bad. So then it might be a employment issue, a talent issue. They just might not have the people on board that are capable of doing it.
[01:02:18.090] – Jonathan Denwood
I think you’re totally spot on there, but we can only make guesses. We don’t know, do we? Are you okay to go on for the next two questions or do you have to call it a day?
[01:02:27.940] – Baldur Bjarnason
No, I still I have some stamina left.
[01:02:34.220] – Jonathan Denwood
So how do you… I utilize AI. I’ve got a little bit of dyslexia. I found AI to be really useful in my business processes. I’ve been utilizing a lot of the technology for over a year now, but also the other side of me thinks it’s totally blown out of all proportions, but in the end, it will be like the internet, making an enormous change So I oscillate like all these technologies. But when you look at them, there’s always a load, there’s real change, and there’s just Waffle, isn’t it? It comes with it always. But how do you see AI? How do you see AI where we’re going to be in a year’s time or eight months? Do you think it’s going to be in a very similar scenario with improvements? Or do you think there’s going to be a quantum move in the next year or 18 months?
[01:03:40.100] – Baldur Bjarnason
So I actually wrote a book on the business risks of generative as VIA last year. That’s why I haven’t read it, but I did know. So I could talk for hours.
[01:03:52.680] – Jonathan Denwood
You have to come back. The short version is that irrespective the technology, and you can debate the technology itself back and forth, the companies involved are fundamentally dishonest, like OpenAI.
[01:04:10.230] – Baldur Bjarnason
And I mean this in an absolute dead serious. These are Some of the history involved with the people in this field, as a general, is very dubious. You have research papers that are iterating concepts like phrenology of being able to detect whether somebody is criminal based on the shape of their head. You have- Well, I’m doomed then, isn’t I? Yeah, all of us. And then you have the fact that quite a few of the people involved were very deep into crypto coins and what looks from the outside as just entirely fraudulent behavior. So when I say that these are- Obviously, you’re based in Iceland, so you’re okay, but you need to say, In my opinion. In my opinion. Oh, yeah. In my opinion, based on the outside perspective, looking at the things without knowing what’s going on in people’s mind.
[01:05:11.910] – Jonathan Denwood
Very important two words in my opinion. Yeah. Three words, in my opinion.
[01:05:16.910] – Baldur Bjarnason
But the risk there is that, the first one is that we don’t actually know whether the technology is working as well as claimed because all of these companies, they’re both by people who used to be involved in crypt coin and whether that, in your mind, automatically associates them with fraud and criminal behavior. It’s like, that depends on you, but I know that there’s some association out there that are involved, and that goes for pretty much all of these companies. We can’t entirely trust either them, their decision, or the data that they’re releasing. We don’t actually know. With the release of to be for. Openai made all sorts of claims about what this technology was capable of doing, but they didn’t give anybody access to the data needed to replicate those findings. Then later, when people manually replicated those findings later on, it turned out they had overstated the capabilities of the model for those specific tests by 100%. The performance was literally half of what they claimed. The caveat here is that I think that no matter what the technology is capable of doing, it’s going to be doomed by the fact that the people involved are not to be trusted.
[01:06:39.420] – Baldur Bjarnason
They are running horrible companies in horrible ways and doing horrible things.
[01:06:46.710] – Jonathan Denwood
I just want to use the word ‘doomed’.
[01:06:51.320] – Baldur Bjarnason
I mean, it’s a financial bubble currently, and the bubble is going to burst. And Whenever a financial bubble bursts, it’s going to take out a ton of companies with it. So we can’t rely on anything.
[01:07:10.000] – Jonathan Denwood
The present argument is that the large companies will be able to reduce their work in the amount of people that work. They will be able to- Or they want to do the same thing they’re doing today.
[01:07:25.390] – Baldur Bjarnason
These are tools that are very… It It can be, under specific circumstances, very useful to increase people’s productivity in specific ways, but they don’t… Like the productivity gain in most studies is something on the order of 10 to 20 to 30 %, depending on how synthetic the task itself, depending on how isolated the task can be from other parts of the project. A 10% gain does not let a company lay off Like 10 % of their staff.
[01:08:03.200] – Jonathan Denwood
Not any of the business.
[01:08:05.470] – Baldur Bjarnason
So the layoffs that are taking place are completely unhinged. They are completely disconnected from any reality of what this technology is delivering. And that’s another risk, is that they’re acting on the absolute best case speculative effort of what the technology might be able to do in five years, but they’re doing the layoff today. And that is That actually is an existential risk for these companies. There’s a non-zero chance that these companies might be cutting to the bone and actually killing the organizations and setting off a terminal decline, where they take a profitable company and turning into a loss-making one within the space of two or three years. So the disconnect here is massive between what the company is doing and what the technology enables And that worries me. It worries me a lot.
[01:09:04.060] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, well, there you go. Large question. Large question. So if you had your time machine, HD Wells, or your watcher, Doctor Who, you got your tardiness. And you could go back to the beginnings of your career. It doesn’t have to be something enormous because we all change during our careers. And some of us don’t, which is very sad. But if you could have just one little tip bit, you could tell yourself, or some little hint. Has anything come to mind if you could go back to your early self at the beginning of your career that you wish you knew now?
[01:09:48.920] – Baldur Bjarnason
Oh, well, yeah. Don’t bother with learning Macromedia Director. It’s a complete waste of time.
[01:09:55.660] – Jonathan Denwood
When I was doing my degree as a mature student, the head of the department had a film about a director. So much time I wasted on that.
[01:10:07.440] – Baldur Bjarnason
And it turned out to be completely worth it.
[01:10:09.420] – Jonathan Denwood
He loved it. He loved it. Cds.
[01:10:12.550] – Baldur Bjarnason
I mean, with the lean go of the program language, it was utterly non-deterministic. If you have the same piece of code, copy and paste it into a different project doing the same thing, and it would break in the other project. There was no discernible reason. It was just like The worst development ever.
[01:10:32.320] – Jonathan Denwood
It had a life of its own.
[01:10:33.970] – Baldur Bjarnason
Yeah, but it also turned out it wasn’t as lucrative as I thought. When I started learning it, it’s like, yeah, this will be good for the occasional pings and builds and doing some CD-ROMs. And it turns out CD-ROMs just disappeared overnight. And that turned out to be not a thing—a waste of time. So yeah, that would be my advice to myself. Don’t bother with the Macromedia director. And put an upper limit on how much time you’re going to invest in Flash as well because that’s not going to go in.
[01:11:06.820] – Jonathan Denwood
I did. I did my actions. That’s how I got into the web. I was one of those who performed these terrible actions with the developer types. I did, but it was a hobby. I had another business and did my degree part-time because I was the only person in my family that’s ever done a degree. So far, my nephews and nieces have done degrees, But the guy who was running my course was a maniac anyway. He didn’t like me. I was a mature student. I was running a business with almost 30 people working for me. And he started me out of his bullshit, and I wasn’t going to have it, so he loved me, didn’t he? So there we go. It’s been a pleasure talking to you. I think it’s been a great show. I’ve enjoyed it. What’s the best way for people to learn more about you and your ideas?
[01:12:08.450] – Baldur Bjarnason
Just my website, baldrbiarrison.com. If you managed to, through some miracle, If you want to get the spelling right, you should find me. Don’t just Google the name. There’s a risk you might find the Icelandic footballer Valdiviannison. There are 13 of us with my name. I’m usually at the top of the search engine results. Not always. It depends on whether he’s made a business deal. He went into a restauranteur after he quit football. So I occasionally, by accident, get his emails with somebody who assumes that balder dog.
[01:12:47.820] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s interesting. We might go there because I bet I’ll be in the next football. If the basis of my experience of UK football could be entirely educated I thought it was right. Sorry, that’s a glean, but I will ensure the link is in the show notes, folks. The notes will go up first thing next week. All the links will be there, folks. Thank you for supporting the show, folks. We’re getting more listeners and viewers. To help the show, maybe you could share it on your favored social media platforms, and that will get more people to join us. We will be back next week with a WP Tonic Roundtable show. We’ve got Jason Cohen, the founder of WP Engine, as part of the panel. It should be really interesting… Jason is always a fantastic guest. We will be back soon, folks. Bye. Bye.
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