I found this interview to be of great interest Matt Mullenweg is the 23 year-old founder of wordpress.
An open source blogging tool.
What grabbed me was his idealism married to a commercial business and a sense of balance in a cyncial world.
Deciding not to go into China, is one example, because of censorship. And telling the world that their servers had been hacked. Honesty always leads to greater advocacy as it is closely related to trust.
A cracker gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers WordPress.org. They modified two files to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution. It was painful to publicise, but we got a huge amount of coverage and got the word out that there was a dangerous version of WordPress. Even though there were probably only 10,000 or 15,000 people affected, we ended up getting half a million downloads [of the update]. So everyone was updating. Which was good, actually.
Mullenweg goes onto say
For me, open source is a moral thing. Software should be free; it's our philosophy as a company
The smart thing is working out from thisd point how one makes revenues that are sustainable and scaleable.
We see this time and again where the philosophy of our old media and business world is in direct conflict with our new media and business world. Ajit calls it Open Gardens So what we often get is a halfway house of innovation tied to old ways of thinking and doing vs. new ways of thinking and doing.
This is the wealth of networks a term created by Yochai Benkler which is no longer geo-centric, is social and participatory. It is in fact what we describe as engagement. engagement can take many forms and it can have many deliverables. All the examples that we provide here are premised upon engagement and The 4 C's which underpins the philosophy. and of course our recent discovery Edgar Cahn which is a far cry from Milton Friedman and here
And as a consequence of these things we see change
In the past open source has been focused on developers. Within the last few years we've had a rise to prominence of consumer open source applications. That's a new set of challenges. If you're building something for a server, there's usually a defined output which is right or wrong. In consumer applications there are different ways, which aren't necessarily better or worse, so people have strong opinions.
Mullenweg mentions Ubuntu, a term I last came across via Mark Earls A company he believes is doing exciting things, powered by wordPress he thinks its a significant step in consumer applications.
Finally the great thing about this job and the 300,000 words+ Tomi and I have written so far, is that it demonstrates how little we know rather than how much. How fast the innovation is going and how ultimatetly that is going to have a real impact on commerce — culture — society and politics.
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