I'm moving around, so I'm masking. I am our mobile microphone, but we have a
standard microphone also. We have people all over the place in the world
at home and we also have a resident question asker right here.
So he's going to represent the online questions right?
- Yes, correct. Also, so you all know
I do not know what any of the questions are in advance. I will be
hearing them all for the first time, which also means I might not know the
answer or I might pass it to someone in the audience, or sometimes I
just don't know. So that's what happens with these.
That's my job. The passing.
All right, so we can kind of start wherever you want. We can start
with in-person. We can start with some pre-submitted. We can start with some
currently submitted. We have an in-person -
Looks like we have a hand right here. You mind coming over to the
microphone? Just so folks on the livestream can hear. And if you have also a
question, feel free to go up and line up. We're going to prioritize, of course,
those of you who came on a train for two and a half days to be here and then I
think Paul will be reading some of the ones that are coming in via the social
channels. YouTube, Twitter, etc. So we'll have a mix of both.
Then we'll have food and drinks.
Thanks so much for the presentation. Very exciting stuff. Looking forward to
the future. My question is about Openverse. And I wonder if you could speak a
little bit about the safety measures that have been thought about or will
need to be thought about in terms of the content that is uploaded there? Will
EXIF data be removed from photos that are uploaded? That's my question.
That's a great question, actually. So first, I do not know if we've thought of
EXIF before. So you actually just raised something really great that we should
write down and look at later. I will say that - so there's two things there.
There's Openverse, which is - think of it like a search engine. So it's crawling
literally the whole web, and looking for things that are Creative Commons
licensed and providing a directory of them. So what people publish to their own
websites is kind of the state of responsibility there. But it's kind of
like a Google but for Creative Commons licensed content. That is separate from
the WordPress.org/Photos directory that we've created, which is kind of like a
Getty or an Unsplash or everything but all CC0 licensed forever and
ever. By the way, we're not going to change that on you like some other photo
directories have. That goes to moderation. If you want to submit to
something there, you'll see that right now, it says, "Hey" - one of the checkboxes
it certifies, of course, one, that you have rights to the photo. Please
don't upload other people's photos to it, only your own. But, two, that it doesn't
have any human faces or other copy written material in the photo itself. So
this first phase of the photo directory really focused on things that can truly be
CC0 all the way. Something we've all been learning - and it's a little
complicated - is with humans and, like, a picture of - let's say you had a picture
of a piece of art that might have a copyright embedded. So even if the image
is CC0, something in it might be copywritten. And so we're
working on - what is an open source, GPL, CC0 model release?
What does that look like? And that is a very open set of lawyers working on
things. But once we have it, I think that's actually really exciting. Maybe
someone could license their likeness as well to be in the Openverse. Maybe
we generate something with GPT-3 that replaces faces and then that's the
thing that's open. Or maybe someone even says, "Maybe while I'm alive, I don't want
my likeness used. But maybe on my death, I bequeath my likeness to this open
commons that belongs to humanity." There's lots of different ways this
could work, kind of is fun to think about and imagine. But that's how that's
working right now. We'll probably, you know, what makes sense is something that maybe
shows the EXIF data you upload before it goes into the thing, at least for a
photo directory. So you're just aware of everything that's being put in there.
Location is actually fantastic to have. Like if I have a picture of Stonehenge
the location where I took that picture is kind of awesome. But other metadata,
which could be contained in EXIF, probably people should just be aware of.
Right? So we'll work on getting that added to the photo uploader. And by the
way, awesome question. Thank you. - Thank you very much for the answer.
Strong open.
No problem. Did we cover everything you think is important there? Anything else?
Okay, awesome. Bob, before you ask your question
can you share how you got here?
By train, from Seattle - From Seattle?
Yeah, Seattle. - That's on the other side of the country, right?
On the other side of the country, and spending about six days on the train, two
days here. And yeah, it's been an adventure. So I've come all this way.
Give me some Woo for 2022.
- Some moo? Woo.
I want to hear what WooCommerce is going to do in 2022 in your eyes.
Sure. So Woo, spelled W-O-O for those who don't know, is a plugin for WordPress, which
creates commerce functionality in WordPress. It's one of the 55,000
plugins that exist. But it is a very popular one, an important one,
especially as we look at things like - you saw Shopify coming up on that usage
graph. WooCommerce is an open source Shopify, and we hope that it can do to
democratizing commerce what WordPress has done to democratizing publishing.
In terms of what's coming for WooCommerce in 2022, the thing I'm most excited
about that's most relevant for this audience is, I would say, embracing
Gutenberg and the block interfaces for everything with Woo. So right now, Woo still
has some ways of doing things which are more tied to the Classic Editor, or
shortcodes, or other ways of creating, like, check out blocks, products,
everything like that. There are some plugins and experiments around
Gutenberg and blocks. And I think that I would love if Woo was one of the best
plugins in the world for embracing how to use Gutenberg. And I think the team's
been working really hard on that. It is an amazing team. That both includes a
lot of community and a lot of the folks sponsored by Automattic to work on that.
And I'd say that's what 2022 - the thing that's most relevant for this audience
I'm excited about is more Gutenberg in Woo.
And we also have the CEO of WooCommerce here. Does that sound -
Giving me a thumbs up? That sounds good? All right. Sounds good.
So more Gutenberg? That's kind of the answer to everything is more
Gutenberg. It's like cowbell. You can always have more cowbell.
You can always have more Gutenberg.
Thank you. Well, that was worth 6000 miles.
Cool. Alright, should we move to an online question or - wait, we got one in
person. And then next, let's do an online one, just to make sure we have
everything from those folks.
Sweet. So my question is about styles. I think, you know, the theme styles and - or
variants, I think they were called initially, is a very innovative idea that
lets people paint their sites. It's great for developers, designers, and
everyday users. So I understand that. I think, what could be interesting, and I
wonder if you've thought about this, is perhaps there's a Style Directory like
we have a Pattern Directory. Is that something we're in the thought of?
I know that there's a couple other concerns, you know, we'd have to have a
standardized way that themes are being made, which we're moving towards
already. So I don't know, I think that's an interesting way to empower people to
also give back to the Directory or into WordPress, just like patterns. Like if
you can save a pattern, can you save a style? And then anybody can save a style?
Is that something on the docket?
I'm going to fast-forward a little bit here into basically science fiction. But if
you could imagine us getting a really great repository of truly CC0
Creative Commons, zero license stuff, around images, fonts, etc. That opens up
a lot of possibilities for creating essentially GPL compatible styles, like
you talked about. If you've ever watched or helped a friend set up WordPress, or
watched a user test or something, one of the most hard - most heartbreaking things
is when someone chooses a theme based on the image in the demo. And I learned
this myself. So in one of the previous themes, like Twenty Ten or Twenty Eleven
there wasn't a lot of open source licensed imagery in the world and so I just took
all my photos and GPL-licensed them. So one of these old themes - I think it's Twenty Ten
there's a picture from Ireland of some sheep on a road. And we would literally
do user tests where people were like, "I like the sheep, so I chose this theme." And it's
like, "Yes, I like the sheep too, but you can put any image in the world there. It
doesn't just have to be a sheep theme." It's really, it's a - yeah, you know what
I'm talking about. Styles right now are tied to themes and it's tied to theme.json
And so I think theme.json is - theme dot J-S-O-N, which I call JSON. I don't
know how you pronounce it, but that's how I call it - it's the number one thing. If
you're a theme developer or interested in developing themes, look up that. Learn as much
about theme.json as possible. So right now, it's specific to the
theme. But over time, particularly for things like typography, which is a
passion of mine. Actually, my very first open source code I ever created,
which was a contribution to b2, the predecessor to WordPress, was texturize.
Which was - I'd learned a ton about typography and I wanted all posts to
have proper typography. So instead of a prime mark in between a word like
that's - between the that and the s - I wanted to be a proper curly quote. And
so this first code I ever contributed to open source was texturized. I'm very
passionate about this. I would love for people to be able to see the incredible
transformations that can happen to a site through updating the typography
and particularly pairings of type where you have might have like, a really
awesome serif paired with a really awesome sans serif for the body text or
something like that. And I think how themes evolve a little bit - actually
I'm not sure entirely how themes evolve but - to be honest - but it's pretty
exciting that the theme can almost be a little bit like - honestly it reminds me of
jazz. I grew up playing jazz. It's why we name every WordPress release after a
jazz musician. Jazz are often based on something called standards. So like a
good chunk of all popular jazz songs are built on rhythm changes, which is a set of
chord changes, actually from I think, a musical song called "I Got Rhythm."
[sings] I got rhythm, I got music.
Really cool chord changes there. Really awesome bridge.
And people have written lots of other songs on top of that. What's cool
is the chord changes - I think I'm a little outside of my realm of expertise
here - but the chord changes themselves are essentially open source, meaning
anyone can use those chord changes. Now the melody right on top of it
might be proprietary, might belong to a specific thing. But that kind of
underlying structure is open. And so I think themes become that kind of
underlying structure. And then what people take on top of it - it's the chord
changes. And then what people create on top of it could be as varied and unique
as all the things written, people have written on top of the rhythm changes
as they're called in jazz
which is incredible. Thousands of songs, countless millions of, like, performances
and solos. So that's my hope for what happens with themes. And hopefully, we
can get more - like, we don't have a ton of CC0 licensed fonts yet. So hopefully,
we can develop more and more of that content in the Openverse/metaverse
that is available to all WordPress users. And the cool thing
about Openverse, as well, is the API is totally open. So that's available to Drupal
users, Joomla users, everyone else - Wix users, Squarespace users. Anyone
who wants to access this content, it is something the WordPress community is
creating for benefit to the world. So if you contribute to that you're
essentially contributing to humanity's repository of cool open stuff that's
available for anyone to use in any way. So I'm very excited about what the
future of Openverse will be. We have the very first - we basically just got the
code ported over and the search engine ported over, and not even the audio yet,
that's coming in January. And I cannot believe more in the mission of that.
Thank you. - Thank you.
Cool, and you can line up behind her if you also have a question.
But come on in. What's your name, by the way?
Ali. - Hi Ali.
Hi Matt. So I create a lot of content around WordPress for the people who are
looking at WordPress in front of them for the first time looking to, you know,
build something with it having never used it before. And I think a lot about
the young people who are looking at WordPress as a path to something, as a
path to improving their life or brightening their future whatever that
might be. And I know that we have in the live stream right now a lot of young
people watching, listening, and being inspired by this. What advice would you have to
those young people who are looking to inherit this world that we're leaving
them? And what advice can you give them as far as using WordPress as a tool
to improve what we're leaving them? No pressure.
That's a cool one.
In my life, one of the most influential things I ever realized
was that everything I was using, every piece of technology, every piece
of furniture, every chair, everything was created by someone who wasn't that
much different from me or people I knew. And so there's crafts that can be
developed when you focus on an area. And in fact, with the internet, there's more
and more of this through YouTube, Wikipedia, online blogs, etc. There's so
much you can learn about pretty much any area that you're passionate about. And I
think, for me, and it might be Steve Jobs or someone else who talks about this, but
just this idea that the things that I use and love are created by people
not that much different from me was really powerful. And that's part of
what got me contributing to open source in the beginning. When I was - again, I got
started on the forums of b2. So b2 is the predecessor to WordPress. It had some
forums, probably run by like phpBB or something. And I just, at first, I was
asking questions and then, later, I saw questions I had already asked being
asked by other people. And I started answering them. I didn't know anything.
I couldn't - I cannot overemphasize how ignorant I was, as a 17, 18, 19 year old
kid in Houston, Texas, who had no formal training, no university courses, etc. So
I think what's exciting about the digital economy is that, in this
Openverse that we're trying to create together, it doesn't matter who you are,
where you're from, or anything like that. It matters what you contribute.
And learning to contribute has never been more accessible and more open source
more open. The other advice I'd give is that, when you're younger, you have a
lot more time than you realize. And to try to invest that time - if there's
anyone young listening to this - in what your passion is, you know. If you
feel drawn to a particular area - I was actually shocked both in my own
experience, and in seeing many other successful folks since then, in how
being a world expert in XYZ - whatever XYZ is - is maybe 100 hours of work in
some areas. Maybe 200 hours of work. But when you're young, you have a lot more
hours than folks who maybe are providing for the family or full-time jobs or
other things. So really embrace that opportunity of both school, education,
literature available to you, etc. to try to consume and absorb as much of it
as possible. I feel so much - one of my only regrets as a almost 38 year old is that
I didn't pay as much attention when I was in school. And I went to all public
schools in Houston. But I had some amazing teachers, like the text I was
given, the literature, etc. was free or inexpensive, and was really
passion from these teachers of some of the best things that humanity has
created so far. So check that out. And the code equivalent of that is
WordPress in a lot of ways. Meaning that, again, you can think of the other
largest Internet services in the world - Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. You
can't go and look at how they work. You can't suggest a change to how the Google
homepage works or the Facebook algorithm or anything like that. Those
are all proprietary. With things like Wikipedia and WordPress, it's all open
source. Which means that you could suggest a change of the WP admin
homepage, which hundreds of thousands of millions of people see and impacts a
lot of folks. So open source for me was a huge enabler - again, not growing up in
the Bay area or the traditional, like, Seattle or other traditional
centers of technology. It was really exciting for me. So I'll start with
that. Hopefully, I guess folks and maybe younger folks like something to start
with. And I saw Josepha raise her hand, so maybe you have something to add there.
- I do. I also have an additional thing. Can I introduce you really quick?
- Of course. So Josepha is the lead of WordPress.org. So she -
she is - all of the cool things we talked about around like the Directories, etc.
Josepha is in charge of that. So she really leads the community development of
WordPress.org. Everything around that. So thank you, Josepha. And now -
And now this. So I think also one of the most important things - where am I
looking? I'm going to look at you, Matt. Also, one really important thing to
remember for people who are getting started with WordPress for the first
time is that the open source nature of it does mean that we also have really
active and passive ways to learn some of the most vital 21st century skills that
the workforce of the future will need. We need it now. But not all of us
actually are any good at it in the world. WordPressers are generally really
really good at it. And there's a reason for it. It's because we do it
every day. And so like that, in the immediate - in my immediate advice that I
can give to people, that is the number one thing. Like, observe the way that
this works, because it's going to be relevant from here until they're done
wanting to work.
Anything else in the audience? Because we have an unusual audience here.
Here we go. Do you mind introducing yourself really quick?
I'm Michelle Frechette and I'm with Stellar WP, but I also do a whole bunch
of other stuff in the community, which is fun. So my question is actually off of those
two responses as well. We have a ton of education out there, right? So
whether it's through Learn WordPress, whether it's people on YouTube, all these
opportunities to learn about it. What are we doing to bring the next
generation in to help continue to grow? I'm watching the age of people I see at
WordPress continue to grow, but not a ton of people coming in with us?
I don't know, I'm looking around. This is a very youthful group.
Well, I'm one of the older here. I admit that. But what are we doing to bring -
I mean, I tweeted last week. Olivia Bisset - she's in middle school - had a
hackathon. I think I tagged you in my tweet. And she herself, with her sister
put on a huge hackathon of all middle schoolers, but that's unusual. So what
are we doing to make sure that the next generation of kids is going to want to
contribute the way that the people in this room do?
You stole my answer because I was going to talk about David and Olivia Bisset.
David Bisset, one of the most prolific tweeters about WordPress, Hi, David.
Will post a lot of gifs from this talk. Olivia is his daughter and already
started to be really active in the WordPress community. I would put that
back to everyone in this room and everyone listening here as well. You
know the old adage, like you teach a person to fish or you teach a person -
you give a person a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a person to fish, you
feed them for their lifetimes. I think you just give a person a blog or, even
worse, a social media account, you feed him for a day. You teach them how to
create the web, which is, in many ways, in my opinion, the most amazing
actualization of shared humanity and knowledge. Like how do we create
something that lasts beyond our own individual lifetimes? It's the web. How
do we create something that lasts beyond us? A legacy, a true legacy? It's adding
to the information that's part of what hopefully goes forward for future
generations. And then becomes - allows us to sort of fast - skip all the
mistakes, skip all the learnings to what's latest. It's upgrading the clock
speed and version of humanity. So for anyone who's listening, mentoring and
guiding someone younger than yourself into participating in the WordPress
community is - you get like. What is it? A mitzvah? You get like an extra
special bonus and, sort of like the history of open source in the world, if
you bring someone new into it. So I'd highly encourage you - and there's so
many, if you look at some of the biggest contributors to WordPress over the
years, a Ryan Boren or a Nacin, etc. part of their legacy, beyond just all the code
they wrote, is all the people they brought in. And the folks who felt like
you know, they knew a lot but they weren't able to contribute or something.
And they said, "No, you got it. You can be a Core committer. You can be someone
who patches a Core bug. You can be someone who translates WordPress
into an entirely new language, or preserves a language for posterity."
Like there's so much you can do using WordPress as the launchpad for
contributing something positive to humanity. And so that is, I think, a real
key. So I don't know what is perfect for the young people because I'm not one of
them anymore. I was when WordPress started. But to the extent you have anyone
in your lives, both here in the audience or broader to the folks watching this
that has that desire to have an impact, teach them how to be involved with open
source and whether that's WordPress or some other open source project, I think
is the best way to contribute to the future of humanity. Thank you.
What's that? - More KidsCamps?
More KidsCamps? Yeah, we do have some KidCamps. So very specifically
we have KidsCamps at places like WordCamp - was it
Orlando? Miami, Miami. Yeah. Which David Bisset helped organize. Let's all be
more like David. If you have kids, why aren't they contributing? I wouldn't
put that on anyone because kids do the opposite of what you ask them. So
like, tell them don't contribute to WordPress. And then maybe they will.
- Take your kids to WordPress day. Take your kids to WordPress day actually is
an awesome idea. - We'll talk later.
Cool. Should we do one from online?
This is a question from - I lost the name. But it was essentially - there were a couple
of references to the metaverse in, I think, sort of a joking way, but
one's on WordPress in virtual reality.
WordPress in virtual reality.
Let's pass the mic really quick. Do you want to say something?
Hey, no, we got one. We got one. Here you go. Again, the
intelligence in this audience is far greater than what I have so I want to
push this back as much as possible. - I just wanted to say
WordCamp Boston did do that, if not earlier this year - it was last year.
They had a virtual reality WordCamp - Oh, cool.
And it was last year. Thank you. Just yeah.
That's a tricky one. I don't know how to answer that, to be totally honest.
Because like, the internet is virtual reality. It's just kind of text-based.
And then when you think of other ways of interfacing with virtual reality, like
VR headsets, or AR, etc. One good thing WordPress - WordPress is great at dealing
with content. So don't build on top of WordPress if you're building like
a messaging system or real time game or something like that. But if you're
making something that essentially is people inputting content and
outputting that to the world, you should probably be building it on WordPress.
Whether it's real estate, records, almost anything. If it's content going in and out
that should be on WordPress. When companies - nameless - should talk about
this idea of a metaverse, they often talk about the interoperability. This
idea that contents or items that you create in one metaverse is available in
all of them. If I imagine my most sci-fi thoughts of the future - science fiction
it's hard for me to imagine that if humanity interacts more and more in a
virtual space, that will be controlled by one company. I really think it'll
look more like the web. Like a place where people can register domains. We
actually had a joke in here, I forgot to tell. So you get it now. What if there
were something like a DAO, a distributed autonomous organization, that
manage a namespace, which you could pay to own a part of, and in fact, there's
no gas fees for owning part of it. The fees are borne by the merchant.
That would essentially be buying a domain with a credit card on any
registrar. So we have things already that any person listening to this can
have true ownership of, like a domain. That's their, like, home on the internet.
Internet is the best metaverse we've created so far. And part of that's
because of the interoperability, and the open standards that these things are
built on. Patent-free standards as well, which I'll emphasize. So to the extent
that things will be - I don't know exactly what it'll look like. Nothing I've seen
so far is that compelling. But to the extent that there are fun, content-driven things
that are going to be part of the next generations of the web? Web3, Web4
Web5, Web10 - I expect WordPress will be at the center of it.
We've got an in-person question. Okay. Please introduce yourself.
Hi, my name is Bud Kraus. We've never had the pleasure to meet but I've heard you
speak at several of these. - Thank you.
And welcome to New York. So all I want to know
is this is a brand new space. Sorry for the people who aren't here, but
this is a brand new space. What are you going to be doing here? And can we use
it too, the people who live in this area?
Yeah. So for those who are watching online, we're in this cool space in the
Noho - which means north of Houston, which is a New York incorrect way to
pronounce Houston, which is the city where I'm from - neighborhood. And it's
a cool neighborhood, it's near a lot of public transit. And it's a cool space. A
company I'm involved in, CEO of Automattic, when we purchased the
company called Tumblr, got this space. And so we have this until 2025. Not
coincidentally, a lot more of the people working on Tumblr and everything we do
have gone more distributed. So there's not as many people in this particular
space as there used to be. But we tried to create this in a way that, much like
tonight, could be a place that people use for events and other community things.
So if you're interested in doing that, for something particularly open source
driven within the community, we're happy to open up this space for anything in
the future. And a cool kind of aside is all the art in the space, including
what's behind me, is from people on Tumblr. And so these are all publishers
on Tumblr. So all the art that will be in the space and eventually - right now
we have this wall covered. We're going to cover every single wall here. So we
have many thousands of square feet to cover still. It's all going to be people who
publish on WordPress and Tumblr. And in the future, Tumblr will be powered by
WordPress, so that'll happen. So it'll all be the same thing. So it's kind of
cool that it'll all be artists that use open source publishing to put their
content into the Openverse. Alright.
Hi, Matt. My name is Anil, and I have a curiosity question. You mentioned about
Gutenberg Phase Three, which will be collaboration. So I'm curious, what can
we expect at that phase of Gutenberg and collaboration?
That's a good question. Because I talked twice as long as last year, but maybe
missed that particular point. So that Collaboration Phase - collaboration?
Sorry. Phase Three of Gutenberg is - imagine Google Docs. It's probably the
best analogy. You know how when you're in a Google Doc, when someone
else is editing at the same time, you see exactly what they're doing, what
they're changing. So imagine every single thing on WordPress updating in real
time, as other people edit it. So there's no more version conflicts or
anything like that. Literally, WordPress represents the kind of real-time source
of truth for whatever the content - whether it's, again, posts, pages, or
other in real-time. And then there's both a real-time awareness and workflows
around editing that. And so the real-time awareness is kind of the easy part
actually. It's that part where when someone else is editing at the same
time, and you're editing it, you see what's happening. So there's no
conflicts. The workflow is a little trickier and that's what I'm
actually more excited about working on. Where workflow is a word we use for
someone edits it, someone approves it, someone like - there's different stages of
different forms of content. Which is also very relevant for translation.
Someone writes the content, let's say in English, and then maybe it gets
translated into another language. I realized this personally, to share
another weird story like the economics thing. On WordPress.com, we use
GlotPress and allowed anyone to translate any string on WordPress.com.
And for a while, on every - I forget which language it was, but let's just call it
Italian. Instead of saying "Leave a Comment" on every Italian blog hosted on
WordPress.com, it said "Happy Birthday." So someone obviously was like trolling us
and said, like, instead of "Leave a Comment," it'll say "Happy Birthday."
That was actually pretty funny. Whoever did that, I'll buy you a beer. But
ideally, there would have been a workflow or someone else who speaks
Italian would have said, "This says 'Happy Birthday.'" How do you even say that
in Italian? Does anyone know? I know you say "Feliz navidad." How do you say like
happy birthday and merry Christmas. What is happy birthday?
- Buon natale? I'm guessing
Buon natale? Okay, okay. We'll go there. Someone would have seen that and said,
"That doesn't mean 'Leave a Comment.' And we shouldn't put this on the
homepage of every single Italian WordPress in the world." So that
workflow, I think, is key to Phase Four of Gutenberg, which is why it's part of
Phase Three. So collaboration is the fun part, which will be easy and hard to do
at the same time, which is that kind of real time co-editing. And there's some
cool new standards in browsers that allow us to do this in a decentralized
way, which I'm really excited about, using essentially features built into
Chrome and others that allow us to, like connect multiple people editing a
page or post at the same time, using just a browser and open source
technology. But the more like, approval, etc, is a little bit more of the later
Phase Three. So 2023, we'll work on that. For now, contribute to Openverse,
block patterns, blocks, and block themes. That is the key for 2022. Again, if I
get on stage next year, and say there's 30 - we've gone to 40 block themes?
Utter failure. Please throw fruit at me or something else. I hope that we have
300, or ideally 3000, of these block- enabled themes and that's - both that's
updating existing themes and creating new ones to allow people to express their
creativity online through the Gutenberg editor. Again, right now, if you look at
what social networks do, they try to really narrow you into a very limited
expression of creativity. Why? Because they want to serve ads against your
profile and what you're creating. They want to target you. That's not what
we're trying to do with WordPress. So we want you to create the most unique, cool
stuff online as possible. And blocks enable people to do that. And I'm
looking forward to more and more of it. Does that answer the question?
- Yes, thank you. Cool, thank you.
I saw someone stand up over here. Was that? Okay.
You have preempted so many of the questions that were submitted.
Oh! - We're getting you one, though.
Somewhat related to what you were just speaking to, the question is:
soon we'll have blocks that allow you to drag everything everywhere. We'll soon
have a ton of free images, patterns, etc. How are we going to make all that
easy to understand and use for users?
Yeah, that's our problem. So this is what is going to be, I think, the focus
of Core WordPress iterations over 5.9, 6.0, 6.1, and beyond. I'll say it in
an abstract sense, which is things like user tests. And we do run these and we
publish them on our Make WordPress blogs, which is where we'll ask someone
who has never used WordPress before, "Please try it out." And this is something
proprietary software companies do all the time. But in WordPress, we actually
publish these. And so you can see them and you can learn from them. And you can
see what someone who's never used WordPress before has trouble with using
and not using. Things that might be very, very intuitive to people in this room
because we've been using WordPress for five or 10 years, might be very
challenging to someone entirely new to the concepts or the abstractions that we
use. The other example, which I hope everyone listening to this does - because
if you're listening to this, you're like a WordPress OG - is helping a friend use
WordPress. Right? I hear a laugh in the front row. It's like that whole thing
like, "Friends don't let friends publish on Wix." Take someone who's
building a website, you say, "All right, I'm going to help you set this up." And
while you're doing that, you're probably going to learn a lot of things that are
tough in WordPress. And hopefully, that helps you then contribute a bug or an
improvement or something into the Core software that makes it easier for
everyone else to use. By the way, to the extent WordPress - again, that's what's amazing
about it to me. When you look at that 10 times larger than the second in the
marketplace - by the way, Shopify is a company valued at like $140 billion. How
did we do that? How do we be 10 times larger than that? It's just people
helping other people. I can't put it more simply than that. It's how
WordPress has had basically no marketing dollars through its whole history. Its
friends telling friends, like, "Hey, you want a website? Let me help you set it
up." And then when they have trouble, coming back to a cool WordPress Make
site or something else and saying, "Hey, my friend had trouble with XYZ. Can - I
think if we move this around or change this widget or make this button more prominent
or something like that - that would be more intuitive for folks." And the beauty
of a project like WordPress, and there's a few other open source projects which
are similar, is we can simultaneously become more intuitive for new users at
the same time that we become more powerful for power users. That's not
easy. I think it can only happen in the digital realm. Like an SLR camera with
like 80 buttons can't also become simultaneously easier for people
just taking their first photo. But in the digital world, we can do that. And
that's actually really, really exciting. So that's part of what excites me about
WordPress, and I hope is a part of what people contribute in the future.
Another from the off site questions? Let's see. This is from Sarah Gooding.
What can WordPress do to protect small publishers from the threat of big tech
companies' greed and hostility to the open web?
Oh, my goodness.
Big tech companies - was it hostility to the open web?
Greed and hostility to the open web.
Greed and hostility. Oh, my goodness, we're dealing with one of the
seven deadly sins. First, I'll say that there's some giant tech companies whose
greed and hostility is somewhat aligned with the open web. Meaning that a Google
who is indexing the web, is probably more aligned with the mission of WordPress
than a Facebook, which is trying to create an alternative to the open web or
other companies. Fill in the blank there. So that's something to keep in mind. The
number one thing I think we can do is create an alternative. So it's easy to
forget that someone starting a WordPress might not want - the thing they
wake up in the morning and think about is not like, "I want to make more open source
software in the world." They might be thinking, "Hey, I want more customers in
my restaurant" or "I want more visitors, to my salon" or "I want more readers of
my novel I'm working on." Like, whatever it might be. And the beauty of WordPress
is there's so many things you can do on top of it. It's that WordPress is a means
to an end. And this is our strength and our weakness. On third-party measuring
services, like a Quantcast or a Nielsen or something like that, like
a facebook.com or a google.com shows up as one domain. And WordPress is, in many
ways, like the dark matter of the web in that it's the thing that comprises
the majority of the universe, but doesn't show up on one domain by
definition. It's across millions, tens - hundreds of millions of different
domains and represents each person on the domain owning a piece of the web.
It belongs to them. Literally domains, I'm not - I'm going to pitch domains
here. Domains are like the most Web3 thing you could create. It really
belongs to you far more than almost anything else. So I think what we can do
is - well, I'll tell you the biggest thing I've learned, which goes a little
back to your question on what is a thing to talk about to the youth or
people that create things. Early on, I was like a Slashdot reading zealot.
Meaning like, I was like, "Ah, Microsoft and Bill Gates are evil." I had a very
like, black and white view of the world where I saw open source as good and
anything proprietary as bad. And it was binary. As you mature, you learn that
things are not binary. It's grayscale. It's duotone. And there's things that
are both simultaneously good and bad, and things that exist on the
spectrum. And over time, I've chosen to devote more of my life to things that I
feel like are on the side of the spectrum that I want future generations -
if I ever have children or grandchildren - them to experience of the web. But that
the - everything exists on the spectrum. I would say that for - pure philosophy does
not win. Meaning that for folks, maybe like here in the room, or some of the
folks watching the livestream, the idea of owning your content, owning the software
that powers it and everything like that, is very compelling. That's probably
compelling for like 1 or 2% of humanity. We're at the very end of the bell curve
of folks who care about those things. For the rest, if we want a
majority of the web - hopefully, I hope a majority, or even like 85 or 90% of the
web to be powered by open source. For them, we need to create the best user experience.
Meaning it needs to be the easiest. It needs to be the most intuitive. And it needs to be
the thing that gets them towards their goals the fastest. For many
people, that means WordPress will be invisible. And that's okay. We don't
need people to even know what WordPress is. If they're using WordPress, open
source, open API, open data, everything to get to where they're going, that is
infinitely better than using proprietary software to get from A to B. So we need
to create as many use cases, as many -
work on usability as much as possible to create that. So that is my learning. And
something I hope we can all work together great, because even if someone
doesn't realize that using open source and making the web more open. If by
creating their website, creating their restaurant, creating their online service
selling something online, they are doing so in a way that makes the web even just
a smidgen more open. That's cool. That's good for humanity. That's the part I
want future generations to grow up in. Thank you.
Okay, we got two minutes.
- No, no. Two questions. Two questions! Okay.
Well, how I talk, that could take 20 minutes.
- Okay, we're down to 20 minutes, so I'm giving you five for each.
Okay, five minutes per for each question, apparently. So.
Hi Matt, my name is Aaron Jorbin. I probably came the shortest distance
because I live, like, three blocks away. A couple of times, tonight, you've
talked about the GPL, the importance of the GPL, the importance of the Four
Freedoms of the GPL. Over the last year, there's been an effort to dual license
the Gutenberg repository, and thus allow people to use the WordPress code in ways
that would not confer those four freedoms on to future users of
WordPress. I'm wondering how that lines up with your ideas of the four freedoms and
why I, as a contributor to WordPress, should support my code being re-licensed
to remove the four freedoms from future users?
That's such a good question. So thank you, Aaron, for asking that. And also,
thank you for being someone else who makes me not the only person in the room
with a suit. And Aaron looks great. So thank you very much for that. Hopefully,
we get that on camera. So this is interesting. So the GPL was created in
the 80s and 90s, and had no concept of, essentially, delivery over the web. So
the GPL says that if you share something, distribute it, which was - historically
means, distributed the source code over like floppy disk, or CDs, or things like
that, you must confer the same freedoms. But it didn't count if you were just
running your website, which is good and bad. It's good in that, like, your
password file on your WordPress site is not GPL. Right? You don't need to share
that to the world. There are licenses like the Affero GPL and others that say
like you need to share everything, but it also creates a loophole. So technically,
like WordPress.com doesn't need to share any of its code back to the world. It
does. Those folks work really hard on putting improvements back into
WordPress, but they're not required to because delivery and distribution through SaaS
services does not confer the distribution in which the GPL was intended.
In practice, we do it but in letter of law, it's not required. Mobile apps
are whole new worlds. And again, there is the ideal thing and there's the
pragmatic thing. Practical - ideally, I would love to use a mobile device which
had firmer hardware, and everything involved with it was fully open source.
Pragmatically, I need to use an Android or iOS device, probably from Apple or
Samsung, that works. That has good battery life and everything like that.
So I've always thought of myself as a pragmatic, open source evangelist.
Gutenberg. Now how do we bring this to Gutenberg? So, Gutenberg is trying to
create a pan-CMS or pan-creation standard for things like blocks. We
think, or I think, that in Gutenberg, if we can create a standard interface for
things like adding an image or the basic things that you do within a block
interface, that is good for the web and humanity. So part of that is that I
would really like to see even proprietary systems adopt Gutenberg
blocks. I think that would be a win. You know, I've made fun of some systems like
Wix and Squarespace or Mailchimp or others. I think they - I would love
I would be thrilled if they all used Gutenberg. And Gutenberg is licensed
under a way that, if you use it, you don't have to make the rest of your
software also open source. So the way the GPL is, is it's what's called a
"viral license." So if you use part of it, everything else that links it also has
to be open source. Which I like for WordPress. I like for everything I do.
But I also recognize that maybe, in let's say, a mobile app, I might want to
have an open source-based editor that uses the standards and code of
Gutenberg, but the rest of the app might not be open source. Maybe it's the
Mailchimp app. Let's use Mailchimp as an example. I don't have any relation to
Mailchimp. So I can talk about that. Mailchimp's awesome, very successful, just
sold to Intuit for like $10 billion or whatever. If you look at what they're
doing with their newsletter creator, it's blocks. If you look at what they're
doing and like - and they don't actually have a great mobile app yet, so it'd be
cool. So when we took our mobile apps - which means developing Gutenberg three
times. We have to develop for the web, iOS, and Android, which is a lot of
work. We are re-licensing the mobile versions of Gutenberg as MIT, which
means that they can be embedded in mobile apps, which are not also open
source. This gets into another weird thing, which is all mobile apps are
mediated by app stores. I don't love that, for the record. But it's the
reality. You're either going through Google or Apple to distribute on an app
store to the majority of humans in the world.
And you have to - when you distribute your app, you kind of have to - you don't kind of,
you have to agree to their terms of services and licenses, which are sort of
compatible with open source. Actually, WordPress has been a pioneer there.
Apple originally did not allow GPL applications to be distributed on the
Apple Store. And WordPress fought for that. And we won it, essentially. And, in
fact, Apple has used WordPress code in demos. So we kind of got the unofficial
blessing that like, our GPL app was okay to be on the Apple store. But like,
that's still a process, which we fight and we go for. Most famously - was it
last year that it happened?
Either last year or earlier this year, it all blends together.
It all blends together. I don't know. Post-COVID, everything's a real mix.
But that Apple issued an incredibly rare apology, which Apple never does, where they had
sort of told the WordPress open source app they needed to do something that
seemed a little outside of the requirements and the license. And they -
someone higher up realized that and walked it back. So not often that
happens with a $2 trillion company. But it happened with WordPress and Apple.
And that was exciting. So we will continue fighting wherever we can for
getting these app stores to open up a little bit. We will also be pragmatic in
that in reality, everyone who has an Apple or iOS device means you go to the
app stores to reach them. And I think it's actually a flaw of - if we think of why
Drupal or Joomla hasn't done as well, I think they need apps. And I've
encouraged those communities to create great apps because they need them.
Why we're expanding the license of Gutenberg, in particular, to be both GPL and MIT
is that I would like WordPress blocks - or Gutenberg blocks to become standards
that are larger than just WordPress. And there is a Drupal version of Gutenberg
etc. But I think part of that is that if blocks can become standards across every
proprietary system. I make fun of Wix - I think it's fair, they've earned it. But
if they adopted Gutenberg, I would toast them and take them out to beers.
I think that'd be awesome. Gutenberg is something even bigger than WordPress,
which is basically saying how do we edit and create the web? And can we get as
many people - both proprietary and open source - collaborating on that as possible?
So that is the bet we've made. Maybe it's correct, maybe it's incorrect. I hope
that you, as a contributor, still are excited about being part of Gutenberg,
even though it's Gutenberg and MIT, which are both open source licenses. But
MIT, of course, allows proprietary licensing. I understand that. The
majority of open source software in the world is, well, I think majority is GPL.
But there's a big chunk that's non-GPL. I think, what we're doing - folks in this
room, you and I - are creating more that open source stuff. And if proprietary people
use it along the way to creating more open source, I think that's great and okay.
Thank you. - And thank you for wearing a suit.
And thank you for coming tonight.
Someone asked me earlier why I wear a suit. And it's actually - one of my
favorite folks is Frank Sinatra. And he talked about - someone asked why they
wore a tux every night to perform. And he said to the other band members, he
said, "Well, if we were performing for the king or queen, what would we wear?
We'd dress up. We'd wear a tux to perform for them." And he said, "Well, every
single night that this band performs, there might be someone in the audience
who saved up two months to be there, or a waitress or someone like that, who
really worked to be there. And so, guess what? We're gonna dress up for them and
perform for them like they are the King or Queen of England." Royalty. Every person
in the audience is royalty. So that's why I wear a suit every year. If you're
wondering. This is like the only suit I wear during the year, but I wear it because I
consider every member of the WordPress community to be royalty. And I dress up for
y'all. So thank you.
Alright, this is the last question. I'm so excited.
Bring us home.
I think it's a short question. Hopefully it wasn't already asked.
Can you introduce yourself?
Hi, I'm Rachel Winchester. Most people know me as Win. I'm here for representing
DigitalCube. And I'm just curious if the topic of internet art has made it on
your radar. And if it's something of interest to you.
Tell me more about internet art. How do you define it?
Well, internet art is browser art or web-based art. But it's art that uses the Internet
as a medium. So it works with WordPress, because WordPress is that paintbrush.
Hmm.
I will also call out that you have an amazing Issey Miyake purse, who's one of my
favorite designers of all time. Thank you for bringing that to the microphone
as well. What do you think about the Openverse and internet art? Like this idea
that people could maybe even contribute internet art to the Openverse?
Oh, I love the idea of making publicly accessible images more accessible.
I love that idea.
That this is - it's an interesting tension, right? Because artists create
things, and they want to earn a living from the things they create. And people
create things and want to contribute it to the commons of humanity. That becomes
part of what we remix, part of what we build on, part of the foundation of what
creates the next generations, next versions of what happens. And in
copyright law, which I would say is popularly epitomized - since in United
States copyright law, you have an ability to do that. You know, rest in
peace for Joe Ablow. Like, would talk about his 3% rule where he would take an
existing thing, modify 3%, and create something new. Incredible, right? One of
the great artists of our generations, in so many ways, that affected popular
culture, that affected art, that affected so many things through that taking something
that exists and modifying it. So I don't know. I think that's the epitome
of open source. I would say that WordPress' limitation is, before, that
was basically all in the code and language realm. It was all about the
plugins, the themes - a little bit of design, and the translations that were
open source. If you had to define what's next for us, it's expanding through the
Openverse, through things that are more content-driven: images, video,
audio, art. I'm a photographer. My username is Photomatt. So I consider
photographs to be art and I hope to put more and more of the art I create and
hopefully others into that commons, so that is the basis for what generations
create in the future. So, thank you so much. I appreciate the question.
And with that, I think we might be - I mean, Josepha's coming up.
I've got two notes for everyone, because I would, naturally.
Number one, there were a lot of questions
that were asked beforehand and also in the livestream chat that we
did not get to. But just like last year, we will have a blog post up where we can
get those answered for you all. Don't worry. And my final, final thing, let's
have a round of applause for the folks who put this event together and for our
excellent slide makers.