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00:03The internet is no longer a benign place about community.
00:07The web has grown up and become much more commercial and really competitive.
00:20It describes this pattern of platform decay.
00:23First platforms find a way to lock users in and once it's hard for them to leave, they make things
00:27worse for them
00:27in order to make things better for business customers.
00:30Once they're locked in, the platform withdraws all of the value from those sellers as well
00:35and eventually it's just a pile of .
00:37If we're in a world where only commercial software exists, that means your reality is dictated by commercial interests.
00:44Open source is a way to build software that increases freedom and autonomy in the world.
00:50And I feel like we have to fight for that freedom.
00:53There's this expression in the open source world, you know, free as in freedom, not free as in beer.
00:59Because a lot of people think that free means, like, I don't have to pay for it.
01:06The free stands for the freedom of using, reading, modifying, sharing the code.
01:12One of the defining things around open source is that anyone can scrutinize the work.
01:17The reason why every single company in the world is built on open source is because it is the safest
01:23technology of all.
01:25With open source, you can see the decisions being made, you can see the lines of code, you can decide
01:29what you want to do with your data.
01:30It's like a technological democracy.
01:33Anyone who wants to can take our content and do anything they like with it. You can copy it, redistribute
01:38it.
01:38It really allows different people to work together.
01:42There's an aspect of what do we give back to the world.
01:47We have this Promethean task to take the fire from the gods and bring it to the people.
02:00My dad, he was always tinkering.
02:02We didn't have a lot of money.
02:03We'd often buy things that were broken or breaking down.
02:06Cars or stereos.
02:08We'd go to garage sales, buy something that was cheap but broken.
02:10He would open it up and figure out how it worked and fix it.
02:13And that's how kind of computers worked at the time, too.
02:17My dad's job was he was a computer programmer.
02:19Sometimes he'd take me in on Saturdays when he would go into work.
02:22It was a big, kind of like a cubicle farm.
02:26They had a really, really fast internet connection compared to our dial-up at home.
02:29So that was always very fun and definitely, like, got me excited about different software or games or other things
02:35that you could do on it.
02:38Look at our big Christmas, Scott. Can you tell us what this is?
02:42It's an Apple computer.
02:43I got my first computer when I was 12 years old.
02:47I ordered it out of a catalog.
02:48It was one of the first Apple computers.
02:50We had a gateway PC.
02:52You know, the computers that came in the cow print boxes.
02:54It was in the fifth grade.
02:56It was a CRT with the green text on a black background.
03:05My first interaction with the internet would have been just late nights on the computer, slumber parties where we were
03:10playing around on the internet.
03:12Netscape Navigator, Ask Jeeves.
03:14The adults around you didn't really understand, so they just propped this in front of you and said, go ahead.
03:19It was the Wild Wild West, if you could imagine.
03:22My friends were saying, hey, if we can go to this computer, we can find out anything.
03:28And it was just kind of like this sort of explosion.
03:35I think growing up the world felt small.
03:38It felt hard to pursue the things I wanted to do.
03:41I had a blogger account when I was in sixth grade.
03:44I got used to blogging, got used to HTML, got used to CSS.
03:47I got used to the idea of publishing and that feeling of expressing yourself.
03:51Even if it was just a small audience, it helped me feel like I actually had a voice.
03:56I think it helped me kind of see the world as a bit bigger.
03:59Growing up queer and in Florida, I grew up without visible models.
04:04And then suddenly you're introduced to this whole world where you can see yourself and you're not feeling so alone.
04:16I was following some blogs, early blogs like Scripting.com, Anil Dash, Kotki.
04:21I was like, oh, this seems fun. I can do this.
04:24So I tried different software.
04:26I started with something called Moveable Type, which was based on Perl.
04:28But it wasn't open source. It was proprietary software.
04:31So I started to explore some of the alternatives.
04:34And there was nothing that quite fit what I was looking for.
04:38And so I did this blog post called, I think, The Blogging Software Dilemma.
04:42And I said, I want something with a sensibility of Moveable Type, the ease of use of Blogger,
04:47sort of elegance and beauty of text pattern, and the hackability of B2.
04:53A gentleman named Mike Little, a few days later, left a comment on this blog and said,
04:56Hey, if you're serious about doing this, let's work together on it.
05:04For as long as we've had things like copyright, we've also had the concept of things like the public domain,
05:09or creative works that don't belong to one person, but they belong to all humans together.
05:16What open source does is it applies that to computer software.
05:18For me, it's the idea of collaboration.
05:21The idea that we all work together on something and there shouldn't be a sort of like one-way street
05:27where this group of people creates the thing and this group of people uses the thing.
05:33A good way to describe open source is fundamentally it's a software license.
05:37So you know how normally when you, you know, use a new software or sign up for a website,
05:41they have all these really long legal agreements that no one ever reads.
05:45They say, hey, you can use this, but you have to pay us, or you can't sue us,
05:49or you can only use it for certain things that we agree with.
05:52Or if we decide, wake up one day and decide you can't use it anymore, we can take it away
05:56from you.
05:56You have no recourse.
05:58So it's kind of all about protecting the company and they actually take away freedoms from you.
06:03So open source, it is a software license.
06:06So it's built on top of copyright, but instead of saying all the things you can't do,
06:10it says all the freedoms you have.
06:13I think everyone should care about open source.
06:17The way the internet came to be was originally about connecting human knowledge
06:23and that inherently has to be an open endeavor.
06:27Knowledge needs to be accessible to everyone.
06:33We really struggled in the early days.
06:36I used to joke that WordPress had more developers than users.
06:38There was only like a handful of sites.
06:40But really the ambition of WordPress in the beginning was just a software for me and a few friends.
06:46And I don't think any of us in the very early days could even imagine that it would go beyond
06:52something that was used by just a couple of sites or maybe just ourselves.
06:55It's what's called a CMS or content management system.
06:58So it's software that can run your website.
07:01And it started being for just blogging.
07:04So you could do like an online journal.
07:05And then it evolved to really manage the whole website so you can have pages.
07:09And then it evolved to be kind of like a web operating system.
07:13And it's open source.
07:14So that means that the code belongs just as much to you as it does to me.
07:18So it's pretty neat.
07:20It started small but with a philosophy that started to attract more users, more developers.
07:26And really just gradually over time started to pick up steam.
07:31When I joined Automatic it was 2009.
07:35A very different time for the company.
07:37Much, much smaller.
07:38A pretty tight-knit group.
07:40There was a real energy around helping people understand this stuff and making it accessible to them.
07:46There was about 50 people when I started.
07:50Today there's I think just over 1500 people.
07:53It's not just WordPress anymore.
07:55We have a whole suite of products.
07:57WooCommerce, Jetpack.
07:59Over 40% of the websites in the world are powered by WordPress.
08:07Generally in product design you always want to narrow down who you're building for.
08:12But in something like WordPress at that scale you're essentially building for everyone.
08:18And that I think is a big challenge in itself.
08:22Open source is just such a different way of working that opens us up to massive collaboration.
08:28And collaboration at scale that you don't need in another place.
08:31But also comes with its own challenges and inefficiencies.
08:34We have to get a community on board.
08:36We have to get buy-in.
08:37We have to rally the troops around this new design.
08:42Whenever they are open source there is healthy criticism.
08:47Maybe not always healthy but criticism in general when you open things up and let a lot of people have
08:52feedback on it.
08:54When you're within one of these walled gardens and doing algorithmic development one of the problems is often things go
08:59uncritiqued.
09:00As soon as you open source things like that you have thousands of people combing over what you're doing looking
09:06for problems.
09:07They will evaluate what you're doing to make sure there's no bias, to make sure you're not unfairly penalizing certain
09:12groups or communities.
09:13You bring diverse perspectives.
09:15There's the level of transparency even just from sort of a security perspective.
09:19I think it's the optimal way to build software at the end of the day.
09:23WordPress is like a language.
09:25You learn to speak, you're like, I don't know, a year and a half, two years old.
09:30And then you are never done learning.
09:32To some degree the superpower and kind of like a secret sauce of WordPress is the community.
09:39And so much of that really is happening at a local level.
09:41Every day there are WordPress meetups happening and hundreds of zip codes across the world, regional word camps.
09:47There's dozens happening every year as well.
09:49And that really fuels the future of this community.
09:53The most important thing I think today that WordPress does, that is aligned with what I think the internet should
10:00be, is that the internet has removed the barrier to entry.
10:05It used to be that even if you had the best idea in the world, even if you had the
10:10best skills, the best motivation to launch a business, to build something, you needed support.
10:17You needed capital.
10:18You needed often a lot of time.
10:21It was not open to everyone.
10:23Like, you know, launching a magazine.
10:25Well, you need to print, you need to distribute, you need a lot of things like that.
10:30And so what the internet really has done is allow anyone to start something.
10:35The idea behind Automatic was to, you know, take the WordPress software and make it really radically accessible.
10:42It takes things that 10 or 20 years ago you'd need to know how to code or hire a developer
10:47for hundreds of thousands of dollars or buy very expensive software.
10:50We want to take those things that used to be really difficult or expensive and make them very intuitive, easy
10:56and accessible to everyone.
10:59One of the most misunderstood things about open source that people have is that it's free.
11:07It is free, but there is a lot of investment that goes into it.
11:13It's not required, but part of the social contract of what makes the most successful open source products work is
11:19that some percentage of the people who use it find a way to give back to that project,
11:24to sort of contribute in a way that doesn't just benefit them alone, but benefits the entire community of people
11:30that use the software.
11:31If you don't invest back into the maintenance of something, if you don't, you know, water your garden, if you
11:36don't plant new plants, if you don't weed the garden, like, at some point it will go fallow.
11:40I think it would be a very dystopian internet that we would have if open source wasn't around.
11:46I think it would be very easy to lock things down for people to not truly have access to the
11:53things they create or the things they care about.
11:55It's not something to take for granted. I think it's always at peril. If we don't talk about it, if
12:01we don't highlight, if we don't celebrate it, it's always possible for things to become more closed.
12:07A walled garden is an app or a website that is fully self-contained. It's all internal and closed.
12:15Social networks are a common example. You know, Twitter is an app. It's its own system. Facebook is its own
12:21internal system.
12:22You have pages. You have people interacting. It is like an internet, but it is not the open, free internet.
12:28We've seen why a controlled platform is a danger. The decentralization of information, where our data is going, how our
12:36data is being used.
12:37Each individual person is being picked apart to find out how they could sell more to you and selling it
12:46to God knows who, whether it's a huge enterprises or entire governments that want to surveil their citizens.
12:53That's the scariest part of these closed systems.
12:57From a user perspective, if you are a content creator on a closed platform, that content is not yours.
13:04Everyone should have a website. Everyone should own their own domain, automatic.com, wordpress.com, johnsmith.com.
13:09These other platforms, they serve a really useful purpose for distributing content for finding community.
13:16But you are a tenant on those platforms.
13:21If Instagram or Facebook decided that they were going to change their algorithm,
13:27or if they suddenly shut down, because people remember, maybe not remember, MySpace and Friendster.
13:35What happens to that community and audience that you built on those platforms, they go away.
13:42Like, they could go away overnight, and there is nothing you can do to bring them back.
13:47That's where not being a tenant, but being a landowner on the web is critical.
13:53That way, no matter how these companies change, you will have your home on the internet.
14:00I think open source will become a lot more important over the next couple of years.
14:04With the rise of AI, you're starting to see a lot more people who are trying to commercialize things that
14:09should essentially be open.
14:10OpenAI has been pretty clear about the trajectory it's heading on.
14:14That it wants to commercialize its technology.
14:17Despite its namesake, OpenAI is not open at all.
14:20It's probably the most closed company in the world.
14:23It's really about closed source versus open source.
14:31Aligning AI with open source is quite hard because all of the major models that are the most successful right
14:37now are closed source
14:38and are built in ways that arguably are at odds with, you know, fair use.
14:46They're all trained on tremendous amounts of copyrighted data from people who didn't opt in, and that's just a fact.
14:52With any closed system, I think the biggest risk is that you're ultimately not in control of what you're creating.
15:00Whereas with open source models, I think what AI is creating shares the same sort of fundamental freedoms that the
15:07software itself has.
15:08So I think it creates a fundamentally different collaborative environment where AI is one more player in that collaboration.
15:17But the things that are produced are still a material that the human can look, understand, read and so on.
15:23We are really focusing on using AI to make WordPress even more accessible to non-technical people.
15:32I think that's one of the biggest gaps that we still face.
15:34AI opens up the door for more people to be able to modify the software to their needs.
15:40So I think it's a critical component and a critical advantage of open source in this new age.
15:46I'm particularly interested in how we can expand access to open source to more people, people who are queer or
15:52from a different country or speak a different language or whatever.
15:55I think we need as many different people as possible involved.
15:58The future of the web is, it's not certain.
16:01And I think that companies like Automatic will fight for it and the hopeful part of me says we'll be
16:07successful.
16:12Growing up, we didn't have a lot, but there was always a lot of love, support and curiosity.
16:18I knew that my family would always be there for me.
16:21And I think that enabled me to sort of take more risk as an entrepreneur.
16:25But I didn't actually realize how much my dad followed what I did or how proud he was until after
16:31he passed.
16:32One of the things I found out was that at the office, there was a little bulletin board.
16:37And when there's a press article in the newspaper or something, he would actually print it out and put it
16:40on the bulletin board.
16:45And, yeah, when I learned that, I was like, oh, that just really affected me.
16:49I was like, wow, I didn't realize that he followed it so much.
17:00It takes people really believing and fighting to, you know, create a more free society, a more just society.
17:07Things don't happen by default.
17:08It does require tapping into the inner altruism and the collaborative nature that makes, you know, humanity really beautiful.
17:14When we work for something that's not just for ourselves, but really aims to benefit others.
17:20You know, planting a tree that you will never live to see the shade on.
17:25But you're doing it for future generations. You're doing it for others.
17:28That sort of spirit is very much at the core of what motivates people to contribute to open source.
17:33And hopefully motivates people to use open source as well.
17:36I hope open source will continue to stand for humility, kindness.
17:41Collaboration.
17:42Trust.
17:43Community.
17:44Security.
17:45That people can choose.
17:48I think open source is part of a line of human developments that sort of stitch history together.
17:55It's a mechanism with which we can give back to the long story of human creativity.
18:04Code for the people. I mean, that's what we do.
18:07That's what we do.
18:25That's what we do.