Tithe & Taxes  ## Metadata - Author: [[Crossword]] - Full Title: Tithe & Taxes - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/ef102f3d-f93d-4899-b0bb-ec1829ee5d6b ## Document Notes ## Highlights - Episode AI notes 1. WP Engine's mirroring of the WordPress.org repository sparks discussions on centralization and control within the WordPress ecosystem. 2. The integration of updates for plugins from WordPress.org can be handled via mirroring or establishing an update server, impacting security insights and community collaboration. 3. There is increasing external interest in the security of WordPress, with organizations like Cloudflare showing readiness to assist, raising questions about the sincerity of community collaboration invites from leadership. 4. Concerns are emerging about the long-term viability of WordPress as an open-source project, echoing historical trends observed with platforms like Joomla. 5. A significant disconnect exists between WordPress leadership and community sentiment, with feelings of frustration regarding Matt Mullenweg's tone-deaf responses to community concerns. 6. Community members feel that Matt's optimistic viewpoint regarding WordPress's security, due to its open-source model, overlooks prevailing challenges. 7. The leadership's top-down approach threatens to alienate contributors and encourage fragmentation, raising fears about competing plugin and theme repositories. 8. Past collaborative behaviors within the community, likened to 'tithing,' appear to be diminishing under the current leadership strategy, leading to concerns about motivation and trust. 9. Calls for a more thoughtful and engaging incentive structure highlight the tensions between leadership's decisions and community dynamics, emphasizing the need for improved communication. ([Time 0:00:00](https://share.snipd.com/episode-takeaways/953240d2-5925-4a16-a1ca-33ab70185e9e)) - Exploring the Future and Security of WordPress Updates The process of integrating updates from WordPress.org for plugins involves either mirroring all plugins and themes, which many security researchers already do for ease of vulnerability checks, or establishing an update server that directly requests files from WordPress.org in real-time. A substantial external interest is emerging around this issue, highlighted by Cloudflare's willingness to assist, raising questions about the sincerity of collaboration offers from Matt and the broader community's engagement. Furthermore, concerns are growing regarding the future viability of WordPress as an open-source project, paralleling trends seen with other platforms like Joomla that, despite enduring source code, have seen diminished usage. The shifting sentiment among large businesses contemplating the security of WordPress positions this popular platform at a crossroads, with a potential decline in adoption posing serious risks for the open-source ecosystem. Transcript: Luke What I'm curious about, though, is if someone uploads a change, a new update to a plugin on WordPress.org, how does that end up in this mirror? Jonathan Yeah, so there are two ways you could do it. Either you just mirror all of the plugins and themes. And I know a lot of security researchers already do that anyway. It's not as impossible a task as you might think, because it is really handy as a security researcher to be able to just go, I'm just going to run here. I found this one weird vulnerability. I'm just going to run it against every plugin, right? Or the other thing is, if you have this one update server in one place, maybe if it's not associated with any of your other IP ranges, it can be requesting files directly from WordPress.org And sort of passing those on in real time. I'm not sure, but that's essentially how I would do it. Luke Interesting. It was interesting to see Matt. He referenced that apparently.org is serving 30,000 requests per second. And he welcomed anyone else who wanted to step up and solve this and also contribute thousands of hours to the project. Cloudflare piped in on the thread. Oh, yeah? And was like, hey, we're willing to help with this. And so it's like there's a growing sense of external interest around this. I wonder, what's the degree of sincerity on Matt's part in extending that invitation to someone else to step up? Like, would he cooperate? Does he really want that? I think are fair questions, but people are not just saying, oh, wow, no, we could never do that. People are saying, actually, okay, this is interesting. Like, what does it take to do this? Jonathan Yeah. The other question, the other question that's crossed my mind is, is Matt genuine about his claim that WordPress is going to live forever? In terms of an open source project, does he truly believe that an open source project can't die? You know, I mean, of course, the source code will live on indefinitely. Luke Right. Joomla never dies. Exactly. Jonathan But nobody uses it, right? So, I mean, essentially, nobody uses it. And the same decline could happen with WordPress and that would be such a loss for open source. And it is possible. In fact, this does seem to be starting to happen. A lot of, like we've talked about on the previous episodes, a lot of businesses are starting to rethink. We've heard reports of big enterprise companies rethinking whether they're using WordPress or not. And maybe it's safer to just pay someone with an SLA. ([Time 0:02:29](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5f5cca7e-5772-46bf-951f-cc947adddc58)) - Community Discontent and Leadership Disconnect in WordPress There is a significant perception of disconnection and emotional insensitivity in the leadership approach of Matt concerning community sentiments within WordPress. Despite his sincere intentions, his actions are viewed as tone deaf, indicating a lack of understanding of their impact on the community. The community fears that Matt's optimistic belief in the security and success of WordPress, due to its open-source nature, clouds his judgment about existing challenges. There is a notable frustration regarding the imposition of top-down solutions that could alienate contributors and disrupt the ecosystem. The potential emergence of competing plugin and theme repositories could undermine collaboration and create fragmentation in the community. Historically, community participation thrived under a more collaborative environment, and recent shifts to a more aggressive stance could undermine motivation and trust among contributors. Many in the community lament that their investments of time and effort might be wasted due to leadership decisions that seem arbitrary or reactionary. The call for a thoughtful incentive structure instead of coercive strategies highlights the tension between leadership and community dynamics, pointing out that what once worked well is now at risk of being dismantled without clear justification or communication. Transcript: Luke Well, what I hope I wouldn't do would be to throw a fit, which is what it feels like has been happening. I can't imagine, like, I've appreciated Matt's willingness to do these interviews. I found them enlightening and insightful. And on the other side of it, though, it just feels like Matt's disconnected from the reality of what's happening. Jonathan Tone deaf. Yeah. Absolutely tone deaf. Luke And it feels like he's throwing a fit. And I believe he's sincere. I believe he intends. He thinks he's doing well. But it's like there's this what I would perhaps ungenerously describe as a lack of emotional intelligence about the impact of his actions on the people in WordPress. Jonathan That's why I said that earlier is that I think he doesn't really believe that WordPress can fail. He's convinced that it's completely safe because it's open source. Luke So if I wouldn't do that, where I think what's missing where i think the opportunity here is to think about how do you create incentives in such a way where you're not having to use force Because wp engine isn't really what they're being backed into a corner and forced to come up with their own solutions which is going to only lead i don't think this is going to go the way Jonathan That matt thinks it's going to go if if i were goDaddy, if I were another big host, I would be developing my own mirror of.org as well, and I don't think that that's what Matt wants, right? It's not good from an ecosystem perspective, is it, having all of these different mirrors of plugin and theme repos? Because suddenly it's only one very small step from here to WP Engine saying, hey, we now support all of these premium plugins on our repo. ACF Pro is just in the plugin repo. Yep. And then the plugin team, which I'm a member of, we don't have any oversight over that. We don't have any insight into that. We can't control that. And now people are going to be reaching out to us saying, how come ACF Pro isn't in the plugin repo? Things like that. It's a slippery slope from here. Luke I don't think the tithing didn't work in our ecosystem. Taxes. Well, no, it was working. It was working. Jonathan WordPress was having regular releases. People were contributing. Maybe the contribution rate went down a little bit. And certainly it's going to go down a lot from here. It's going to really, really suffer. I think people are really losing motivation and trust and thinking, what have I put all my hours into just for automatic to have, for Matt to just have a hissy fit and now all this work, What was it for? A lot of people are in that boat. Luke Matt says that he tried the carrot for years and now he's using the stick And I'm not convinced that he had the carrot right. Jonathan I don't know if there is a right way to do it. I don't think that there needs to be a right way to do it. Things were working, so why break it? ([Time 0:11:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/97aa4599-18e5-43f8-97d2-7f52b658e80b)) - Community Discontent and Leadership Disconnect in WordPress Community members express frustration over perceived leadership disconnect in WordPress, particularly regarding the actions and demeanor of Matt, who seems tone-deaf to the community's concerns. His approach reflects a lack of emotional intelligence towards the impact of his decisions on users and contributors. There is a belief that Matt underestimates the risks facing WordPress, assuming its open-source nature provides immunity to failure. This sentiment fuels anxiety about the proliferation of alternative solutions like plugin and theme repositories by other companies, such as WP Engine, which could fragment the ecosystem. Concerns arise over a diminishing contributor base, with participants feeling demotivated and questioning the value of their commitments to the platform. The previous collaborative efforts, symbolized by the metaphor of 'tithing,' seem abandoned, raising doubts about the effectiveness of Matt's leadership shift from incentivization to coercion. Many wonder whether the initial 'carrot' approach was appropriate and challenge the rationale behind disrupting processes that had been functioning effectively within the community. Transcript: Luke Well, what I hope I wouldn't do would be to throw a fit, which is what it feels like has been happening. I can't imagine, like, I've appreciated Matt's willingness to do these interviews. I found them enlightening and insightful. And on the other side of it, though, it just feels like Matt's disconnected from the reality of what's happening. Jonathan Tone deaf. Yeah. Absolutely tone deaf. Luke And it feels like he's throwing a fit. And I believe he's sincere. I believe he intends. He thinks he's doing well. But it's like there's this what I would perhaps ungenerously describe as a lack of emotional intelligence about the impact of his actions on the people in WordPress. Jonathan That's why I said that earlier is that I think he doesn't really believe that WordPress can fail. He's convinced that it's completely safe because it's open source. Luke So if I wouldn't do that, where I think what's missing where i think the opportunity here is to think about how do you create incentives in such a way where you're not having to use force Because wp engine isn't really what they're being backed into a corner and forced to come up with their own solutions which is going to only lead i don't think this is going to go the way Jonathan That matt thinks it's going to go if if i were goDaddy, if I were another big host, I would be developing my own mirror of.org as well, and I don't think that that's what Matt wants, right? It's not good from an ecosystem perspective, is it, having all of these different mirrors of plugin and theme repos? Because suddenly it's only one very small step from here to WP Engine saying, hey, we now support all of these premium plugins on our repo. ACF Pro is just in the plugin repo. Yep. And then the plugin team, which I'm a member of, we don't have any oversight over that. We don't have any insight into that. We can't control that. And now people are going to be reaching out to us saying, how come ACF Pro isn't in the plugin repo? Things like that. It's a slippery slope from here. Luke I don't think the tithing didn't work in our ecosystem. Taxes. Well, no, it was working. It was working. Jonathan WordPress was having regular releases. People were contributing. Maybe the contribution rate went down a little bit. And certainly it's going to go down a lot from here. It's going to really, really suffer. I think people are really losing motivation and trust and thinking, what have I put all my hours into just for automatic to have, for Matt to just have a hissy fit and now all this work, What was it for? A lot of people are in that boat. Luke Matt says that he tried the carrot for years and now he's using the stick And I'm not convinced that he had the carrot right. Jonathan I don't know if there is a right way to do it. I don't think that there needs to be a right way to do it. Things were working, so why break it? ([Time 0:11:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/91f5cd8b-b070-45c7-a8a6-4ebd58adddb9))