Ah WordCamp! The event opened on a Thursday and by Friday late afternoon Matt Mullenweg had driven a wedge into the WordPress community that still remains to be sorted out.
Eventually, I got past the drama aspect of the event and started thinking about the content, and one thing that stuck in my mind was the opening keynote. Joseph Jacks, the founder and general partner of a venture capital group called OSS Capital talked about the difference between what he termed “closed-core” and “open-core” business models.
I just went back and viewed the video of the talk and I think there’s a lot more to be said about “open core” and how it does and doesn’t work. We’ll get to that.
The Bittensor bit
What I also noticed was that there are a couple interesting bits thrown in almost as an afterthought at the end, when Jacks, obviously enthused about the project, took a few moments to talk through what the Bittensor project is.
He was talking about the way that basing a project on a blockchain can allow a community to enforce that everything that happens on the chain is open source.
Who’s source is open?
Jacks said: “It’s also related to something that Matt was blogging about maybe yesterday or the day before which was… we have this kind of phenomenon in the industry where people are trying to say that their models are open source, and they’re really not open source.”
His example for this was Facebook’s Llama, but it’s interesting as background for the way Mullenweg was thinking about the way that the loose couplings between open source projects and companies that exist because those open source projects provide a platform.
Couple me loosely
I think the issue that the WordPress community is concerned about at present is how that “loose coupling” is defined and managed. There’s been a sort of “loose consensus” about what’s acceptable for, say, plugin businesses, but clearly rather different understandings of acceptability have developed.
It’s also interesting that Mullenweg, on the cusp of attacking WPEngine in no small part because it was now owned by an equity firm that he accused of taking value from the project and community without giving anything back, picked a lead-off speaker who invests in companies that build atop an open-source ecosystem.
Mullenweg is clearly trying to reshape and tune the loose coupling model–and much of the pushback from a frustrated WordPress community accused him of hypocrisy regarding this precisely. These complaints grew louder, of course, when Mullenweg subsequently took far more active control over the WordPress.org site and its plugin repository. The community understood the .org site to be a community asset; legally it belonged to Matt.
The question of who governs
I’m not sure how the rift between Matt and a substantial fraction of the WordPress ecosystem will be resolved, but for me it raises the issue of how open-source projects should be governed.
Funnily, I had somehow forgotten the tacked-on part of that opening keynote. I was excited to see how there already exists a fairly large open-source project underway that has a radically different governance model. Because what controls activities and decisions in Bittensor is rules built into the blockchain and the possession of the chain’s currency token, the tao.
“What it also does,” Jacks said, “is it allows the user to basically actively participate in the ownership and governance of the model, so you don’t have a single company controlling the AI that gets produced.”