With the release of WordPress 2.1 I have some concerns.
The ever blurring lines between the WordPress.org and Automattic community continue to blur as Automattic has taken pretty much full control of the WordPress releases rather than the greater community IMO.
While I’m plenty happy with the release products I’m a bit worried that the Akismet plugin which I use comes fully loaded with every release. Are we relying on one company for our support and basically holding ourselves hostage to the will of Automattic? Now that we’ve started seeing Google, Wikipedia, and others seemingly wielding power against the blogosphere we have to consider our options towards relying more on open source tools and communities and less on companies.
While I’m fully certain Automattic will be on the up and up. I think the blogosphere should start looking out for itself. We should begin work on an open source spam blocking plugin as effective as Akismet.
Source: WordPress Development Community
Originally posted on January 22, 2007 @ 6:38 pm
Deja vu! People were very worried when Akismet was first bundled, over a year ago, and as far as I know time has shown that most of those concerns were unfounded. Any company or any service, even Craig’s List, could go wrong at some point, but I was curious if there was anything specific Akismet had done or that I could look at to allay your concerns?
For one thing, Akismet is “bundled” and not really “fully loaded” on a WP installation as referred to by your post.
Rest assured that I’m no Akismet fan, on the contrary, I’m very much pro-SK2 (and more recently, Bad Behaviour).
The fact that it’s bundled, doesn’t mean you have to use it. It’s just like any other plugin where it can be removed as and when you like.
The way I see it, Akismet may be bundled with WP, however, the tediousness of getting a wordpress.com API key just to use it, is the one thing that stops me from using it.
More importantly though, is the fact that you do have a choice whether or not to use it. Saying that we’re somehow held hostage by Akismet, is at the very least, an exaggeration.
Well I think its just the fact that the data is somehow tied into the Automattic team.
Spam Karma 2 just doesnt work as well as Akismet and I just really am curious how Automattic can continue providing this service to the blogosphere without looking at the bottom line.
At some point dollars and cents become important to investors and usually its the free customers who pay the price.
David, it’s great to see you heading up this new open source spam plug-in. Who do you see working with you on this?
Currently its just an idea. But with every great idea comes the emotion and will power to do it.
I will be scouting people out there to basically replicate the similarities in how Akismet is built into something more open source and not reliant on corporate interests.
@ Matt, the whole debate is about how important Automattic has become in the WP development. How much Automattic has forgotten to listen to [former] active and influential open source coders. The whole arrogant/not arrogant debate.
How you state that WP is 95% made of arbitrary decisions (wp-testers-mailinglist). Who makes those decisions? You, together with Automattic staff, mainly.
And the point raised by David in the comments that money needs to come in one day, is a fair point. Unless you have a sell out strategy. You know my take on that, and it certainly would be merited, but what would happen with our platform?
In the end, you have invited people to start own customized WP-builds. Now an active an respected group, with fan base has started an own project.
Trust me, I really do respect the work you have done, together with the community and Automattic, but we don’t believe it anymore that WP.com/Automattic can live of this.
There surely was a financial argument behind the Snap.com integration. That is totally fine IMHO, but experienced people know that the 1.1mio probably are burned by now. Especially since you regularly hint at costs of servers and how many servers WP has.
Disclaimer : This is no flame! ;-)
We’re a profitable company that’s growing fast, the only unsustainable service that’s currently supported as a charity is Ping-O-Matic. (And that isn’t part of Automattic, we just contribute servers/time to it.) Learning from the lessons of PoM, I designed Akismet in a way where 99.99% of its users will never have to pay, and still provide value to the service in with their feedback and data. The 0.001% who do pay cover all costs and make it a profitable enterprise that can benefit the public good and still support itself. If I had a billion dollars, I’d give everything away for free, but I don’t. :) Also if I though Akismet could be as effective as it is today while being Open Source, I would OS it in an instant, it’s the only thing in Automattic’s portfolio that isn’t OS and that bugs me.
Franky, I hold a pretty high standard of quality when it comes to what goes into WordPress core, this bothers some people and they’re completely justified to create alternative projects or forks if they believe their ideas that didn’t make the cut in WP are truly better. That said, great code and ideas in WP core frequently comes from people outside of Automattic, and if you look at the actual stats of where code in WP comes from, you’ll find it’s a very diverse set of people, much larger than the 5 developers who work at Automattic.
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