Yesterday we released FAIR 1.3.
Today we had to announce two of the top faces for the project were stepping back.
It’s been a rollercoaster, y’all!
We understand and respect Joost and Karim’s decision. The challenges they faced: the reluctance of large ecosystem players to invest in neutral infrastructure, the misaligned incentives–these are real. We won’t pretend otherwise. But those challenges don’t define the entirety of what FAIR is or where it’s headed.
This means, right now, we keep going.
So what the hell, ammiright?
First and foremost, FAIR WORKS. As a drop in replacement for running all your updates from wordpress.org you can now use AspireCloud instead. What does that mean? We proved you absolutely can de-centralize WordPress. You can undo all the Gravatar and phoning home stuff, and just get code.
What we wanted to do was make it so we could add in more and more ‘sources’ (like, say, your own self-hosted one!) and give the world the ability to distribute and share. All you have to do is add in a repo.
Beyond that, I have dreams of layering in tools like security checks, reviews, ‘grades’ (how ‘good’ or safe is a plugin/theme) and more.
But you see, you need money to be able to build and host all that kind of thing. Our plan was to get some big players on board so they could control their own code flow. This sadly became a chicken and egg conundrum that did not result in oyakudon (one of my fav dishes, we call it “mother and child reunion” because we’re twisted people).
Someone had to be first. Some big company had to be first.
None were willing to take the risk.
What Risk?
Let’s not sugar coat.
By now, if you’re reading this blog, you know about the feud between Automattic and WP Engine. Frankly it’s a whole lot more drama than any of us needed in our lives. But the reality is that the feud put people, including major companies, on edge. They fear retaliation. I get it.
Did Matt Mullenweg have a point that people (meaning big companies) need to kick in more to this project they’re basing their companies on? Hell yes. I don’t disagree with the issue he raised, I disagree strongly with his methodology.
Fighting takes us away from our goals and honestly, who has the time?
Instead of jumping into a fight, why not make a better path available. Why not reinvent Five for the Future into something like adopt-a-highway. HostingCompanyA adopts the support forums, because their customers use it. They donate time/people or straight up money. BigPluginCompanyB helps plugins the same way. They sponsor someone who doesn’t work for them to chip in.
To do that, everything has to be public, though. That means the WordPress Foundation has to tell us what they need with actual fact sheets and budgets, so we know where to help and with what.
Who Helps the Helpers?
There’s also a flip side to Matt’s argument. The Big Companies who make a living on WP absolutely should be helping more. But the millions of volunteers should be helped more.
The majority of my contributions to WordPress were unsponsored
Okay? We’re talking the 11 years as the plugin rep, and the six years before that. Most of that was on my own, free time. Most of it was unfunded, not sponsored by my employers, and done because I strongly believe that people working together make things better.
And I’m not the only one. The folks behind PHPcs, ImageMagick, and more have all faced issues with funding.
I remain proud as hell over my contributions, the work I did, the ecosystem I helped create. It helped me get my last 3 jobs (that’s including this one).
But I’m sure as shit nowhere near “Post Economic.” And that’s actually okay by me. I did what I could, when and where I could, because I believe in the power of people. I took some massive mental hits from the work, which trickled down into physical.
As I’ve said about why I left plugins: I needed to take care of my mental health. Plugins was killing me. I needed to step away from WordPress as a whole for the sake of my life.
People who work on a certain edge of the tech world have seen shit no one should see, and deal with assholes no one should deal with.
For me, FAIR has been a healing project, as it feels like we’re ushering in a new era of hosting and sharing.
What’s Next?
Well, as my co-chair Ryan put it, we keep going.
So we don’t have a ton of money. Okay, we can keep going. We’ll do it slower, and we’ll step out of ‘just’ WordPress but y’all, that was the plan in the first place!
We always planned to make this bigger. We designed the systems to be agnostic on purpose. We’re just jumping to that a little differently than I’d hoped with TYPO3.
As for me, I keep going for now. I never planned on being a TSC Chair. I’ve never sought out accolades or power. That’s just not me. I’ve been handed it enough times to know that there will be a time for me to step away and let the next generation, as it were, carry on and keep paving the way to a better future.
But that’s not today. It’s not even tomorrow.
Today and tomorrow and for a while yet, I’m here to help make distributed deployment of code a bigger and better reality. I’m here to help shepherd in the freedom of owning your code from egg to chicken (see I brought it back to oyakudon).
If tomorrow, I get a phone call that WordPress.org wants to distribute the load to lower costs and help bring the world ready for the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act next year? Hell to the yes.
I’m here for a better tomorrow. I hope you are too.
