Matt: Hey Steve, welcome to the WP Minute.
Steve: Hey Matt, good to see you.
Matt: You can follow him, Steve J.
Burge on Twitter slash X.
Search for Steve Burge on Blue Sky.
I'm sure you're everywhere.
I don't want to say you're an enigma to me, but you just have a lot of stuff.
Actually, remind Me of me!
With so many different, things going on.
You have PublishPress, you have WP Metaslider, you have Taxopress, at least
that's the Twitter handle, and then you have Log tivity, and Steve Burge is your
personal homepage with all the stuff.
20 years of experience, 12 books you've written.
I don't know, man, how do you do it?
How do you keep up with all this stuff?
Do you have like a team of a thousand, or are you just all in on AI and your AI
agents are building everything for you?
Steve: Neither of those.
we have a, we have a team of, 13, 14 at the moment and, I, I really
haven't done too much to AI in my life.
Matt: Well, I'm surprised.
I'm surprised people haven't been knocked.
Oh, well, let me, let me frame it this way.
A lot of hype.
We see every, every company talking about their AI thing.
Are your customers not knocking on the door saying, Hey, Steve,
give us some AI in your product.
Steve: You know, the best use that I have for AI in my life is, my kids
are old enough to be doing homework that I can't help them with now.
Like, their math homework is too complicated for me now.
And so they'll sit there often with chat GPT trying to get answers on
their advanced algebra homework.
that's about the most of AI in my life so far.
AI
Matt: with his math homework, and I'm like, oh god, I'd want to grade
all this, and I just snap a photo.
I snap a photo of it, and I go, just grade this.
But, just to give myself some credit, so everybody doesn't think I'm a bad
parent, I got three young boys, and when they come home, it's three young boys
trying to get them to do homework, baths.
Food, eat, clean up.
It's, you know, if my wife isn't around, it's chaos.
So sometimes I, I cheat and I take a picture with ChatGPT and that helps me.
at least it helps me for the homework side of it.
Steve: is not helping with any of those other things.
Matt: No, no, it's not making the food.
It's not cleaning the house.
I wish it did though.
talk to me about the, talk to me about your background in, in publishing books.
We're going to talk about publishing, you know, as we were in the green room
before we went into this, but tell me about the background of, of writing books.
What came first, the books or the, the plugins?
Steve: oh the books definitely.
I used to be a teacher and, wanted, wanted to teach and write books, that
was, the thing I still love, you can see behind me, I've got shelves full of
books here, and I really, I just couldn't make enough money as a teacher, I was
a teacher until, a wife and kids and a mortgage came along, and, I was living
in Georgia, north of Atlanta at the time.
as you can tell from my accent, that's where I was born and bred.
Matt: Where were you born and
Steve: I'm from England originally, but my wife, my wife is American.
And we moved to a small town in Georgia.
And I think after two or three years of teaching there, my
salary was 30, 000 or so.
So I needed, I needed to make more money, needed to pay the bills and I
had been dabbling in open source and decided to take my teaching skills
and combine them with open source and launched a training business.
we, we originally were doing it in person.
I'd fly around the country and.
And train people how to use WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, some PHP training.
And it was wonderful.
I got to explore the country, went to pretty much 49 states.
I think doing that, no one ever invited me to Hawaii, but I did get to go to
Alaska once to, to do some training up there and did lots of government work.
This was 2009, 2010.
We'd be up in Washington DC doing lots of training and that ended almost on one day.
You know the the guy from Texas Ted Cruz, the the senator, well back in like 2013
he decided to shut down the government.
Basically he put a hold on things and the government shut down for about three
weeks and all the training contacts we had Just disappeared overnight.
I, I thought we were really clever that we had, lots of, lots of clients.
Our clients were the Department of Energy, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department
of Defense, Department of Energy.
Well, it turned out that was just really one client, the government.
And so that disappeared almost overnight.
it never really came back.
Lots of people, had to push their training budgets a year.
And then a year down the line, things were different and had moved on.
so I turned my attention to books and we ended up writing a WordPress
book, a Drupal book, a Joomla book.
it was all written on WordPress.
There's a platform called Pressbooks.
I'm not sure if you've come across them,
Matt: I think I have yeah,
Steve: you can basically write everything on in the classic editor.
And they will do everything else from there.
You can upload your images and they will do an export that you can then send to
Amazon and they will do a print run of your books whenever anyone orders them.
They will do a, a paperback copy of a book for you.
And it was a lot of fun for a while.
Matt: I recently acquired and not to make this about me Steve, but you know,
it's my show No, I'm just kidding.
I recently acquired Master WP and I You know, listen, I have no immediate plans
as, as I do with most things, I sort of like launch them, I talk about them,
I think about them, I iterate on the idea and then I start something small.
And I think, and this is for anybody's, anyone listening
to this as an opportunity.
I think training for WordPress and educating around WordPress is actually
even in the face of AI and so much on YouTube that those kinds of things are
so immediate but so, I'll use the word shallow, they're immediate but shallow
and I think, you know, people might have, an affinity with, you know what, give me
somebody in person to Give me somebody who's been doing this who can come fly
out to me again or at least Connect with me on a zoom call and like walk me and my
my team through something Do you what's your what's your gut tell you on training?
What is it could it have a comeback even in the face of
all this content in front of us?
Is there a chance?
Steve: No, sadly.
I wish it would.
I, I much, I do plugin development now.
And it's definitely a lot more lonely.
I, it was a wonderful experience actually doing the, the human to human interaction.
talking with people, physically sitting down next to them and helping them.
But I remember the day almost instantly when I realized it was dead that a
company flew me out to Silicon Valley to San Francisco Big semiconductor
company and I was there to do a week of training for them Walked in that
big conference room and there was a TV in front of me and there was basically
14 guys in India all zooming in This is the future in person training.
It was wonderful, but it's time to move on.
Matt: But what okay, so let me just Go back to that.
What about just training from another human, even if it is on zoom, right?
Do you think that there's opportunity there?
Or is it all given up to a I and YouTube these days?
Steve: We did try and do the zoom training, but I think people's
attention span is just much shorter.
Matt: Mm.
Steve: used to get people, I mean this was really pre phone addiction
days as well, but we used to get people in a room for eight or nine
hours, and they could sit down and focus on us teaching them something.
And now you move to zoom.
I don't know if it's something about the quality of the interaction,
but people's attention really starts to fade after an hour or so.
Matt: Yeah.
Yeah.
So you end up selling OS training.
The government shutdown happens.
I think I actually do recall that for those those three weeks.
And then you say, okay, I need, I need to get something off the
ground, literally to survive.
Had you already started to build the plugins?
What was the first plugin and what was that experience like?
Steve: yeah, we had, we'd started to make the move.
We'd, we sold OS training when it was still going well.
OS training was the name of the business, the training business that we had and
a lot of what we try to do in WordPress even now comes from a lot of those
big clients, like, Like some of those government contractors we'll be dealing
with I've got a clear memory of sitting down with someone in one of those big
departments and They just decided to go with Drupal instead of WordPress And the
reason was that Drupal offered really fine grained access control Over what
people in the government department could do and also some way to progress content
through stages before it was published.
And that kind of stuck with me.
There's got to be a demand for this in WordPress as well.
For people that really care about their content.
Either because they actually care about it or because some legal department
is making them care about it.
so we went, we did training for a lot of universities and a
lot of, government departments.
And so we kind of took those learnings and tried to apply
them to WordPress, you know.
What would happen if you have to be really careful about your
content before you publish it?
You probably need something more than just pending review and
draft to get something ready.
some of the, one of the funniest customers I remember was a, A medical company,
one of the household name pharmaceutical companies and they were selling some,
some, some interesting products and they needed to make sure all the content was
exactly accurate before it goes online.
You know, they can't make any medical claims about something.
Everything needs to be exactly proofread down to the letter.
All of the, all of the disclaimers they have on those TV commercials at the end.
Matt: Yes.
Steve: And they had like 16 or 18 of these stages that the content
needed to go through for approval.
And so most of those people I think now are on WordPress.
WordPress has kind of taken over that power of publishing.
Drupal is still around, still doing well.
But I guarantee if I knocked on the door of all those people we worked with in
the past, that they're on WordPress now.
Matt: Yeah.
Yeah.
I want to talk, obviously we'll talk more about the, the importance of WordPress
in the publishing space, but, back to your entrepreneurial journey was,
which came first, give us the timeline, publish press, meta slider all at once.
What were the first few products that you started to launch?
Steve: The first one we launched was Drupal.
There was a old plug in called EditFlow that, yeah, that
was taken over by Automattic.
Matt: Yep.
Steve: And, Automattic does lots of wonderful, has lots of wonderful
products, but quite often I think if someone gets hired by Automattic,
they have to bring their plug in with them, and maybe it doesn't fit
in with the priorities of the time.
And EditFlow didn't.
And we were using it.
So we decided to fork it and make it our first test plugin.
And if you haven't used EditFlow, basically it's like a big editorial
calendar that you can look at all your content that's coming up and you can
drag and drop it to a new location.
Say, hey, we have a post that's scheduled for Thursday.
Hmm, let me drag it to next Monday instead.
Matt: Yeah.
I remember, I remember edit flow.
really well, in fact, now, I mean, I haven't thought about it since, since I
had used it, you know, many years ago.
so you fork it, and that's the first iteration of what is now, let me just
look at this, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, you call them, I call them,
I would call them add ons or plug ins.
How do you refer to them under the umbrella of published press?
Steve: Yeah, we've slowly grown and we may be adding, maybe adding more.
for example, one of the guys who was Involved with edit flow also had a
plugin called co authors plus that again for a fairly, a fairly simple
technical problem, like WordPress only allows you one user for each post.
And he had a, a solution that would allow you to add two
or three authors to one post.
And he'd just been hired by automatic.
I sat down with him at a conference.
it was the.
The loop conf.
If you remember it, I think it might be coming back this year in fact.
Matt: It is, yeah.
Steve: loop conf in Salt Lake City.
And he looked at me and said Steve, I'm going to join automatic.
I don't think I'm going to have much time to work on it.
You should fork the plugin.
there's plugin number two.
and it
Matt: They should make like a wordpress movie about you where
you're just like walking along and all of a sudden like, Plugins land
on your lap and they go, here you go!
Steve: That's really been the way it's, the way it's gone.
Matt: Yeah.
Steve: we got talking to a guy in Michigan who needed some
help with our first plugin.
It turns out he's got like three extra plugins with about 200, 000 users.
It's like, Oh, you seem to know what you're doing.
we ended up hiring him and he's still with us.
I think he, just had, it's like a seventh anniversary with us.
A couple of weeks ago and yeah, just like, almost like carrying a magnet around.
You suddenly, all these, all these plugins start popping up until you
end up with a collection of them.
Matt: Yeah.
I can totally understand.
you know, one of the great things about WordPress.
I mean, obviously it solves so many different needs from like the
mom and pop shop to the individual blogger to, higher ed and enterprise
and publishers and all this stuff.
I mean, many of them can all be interconnected with just a blog, right?
Like maybe all of these avatars have a blog and that's kind of where that
experience meets in the middle, though.
I might yeah.
I guess it might be challenging for you from like a marketing
and product positioning thing.
Like are we like just for publishers, like Publishers capital P?
Are we for enterprise and higher ed that need more like access control?
Is it all of it?
As you've matured the business of PublishPress, how have you dialed
in the right customer for you?
Steve: Oh, good question.
I've thought about that a ton over the years.
we, we originally said publishers and now we've slightly elongated it to say
people who care about their publishing.
because we do have a lot of publishers, a lot of small newspapers, magazines,
but also we have the, the government, the universities, the pharmaceutical
companies, anyone that really cares about their publishing and doesn't
want to just do a quick AI draft and hit publish, anyone that really
needs to check and double check their content before it goes live.
Matt: Yeah.
From, from a, you know, another popular thing that I see, with, you know, I
would say friends and colleagues of ours that, have other plugins, you know, I'm
thinking maybe like Syed and, you know, Awesome Motive and, and other, folks
who distribute to or through hosting companies, I'd imagine this kind of
thing is, Well, you explain it to me.
I'll pose the question.
How is it to get distribution through web hosts?
I know, like, Automatic has Newspack.
is that a thing they connect with you?
And you say, hey, look, you've got Newspack.
I've got a bunch of plugins that work really well for your type of customer.
Let's collaborate.
What's distribution like for you through web hosts?
Steve: We're not really one of those plugins that has
that option, unfortunately.
Newspack is small but mighty.
I, I really admire the work they've been doing.
They've been, They've been like a fairly small, division inside automatic, but
really been making some good progress.
They have, I think, getting up to several thousand websites on their
platform now and they're starting to add some bigger publishers.
they, I don't think they're really quite big enough to be, to have
much in the way of partnerships.
And I know they have like a big license with us and they put published press
on a lot of their, A lot of their news sites, but they're not quite
there in terms of being a, know, like hosting companies have, VIP partners
and proper partnership programs.
They're certainly a little more informal, but they're probably if people ask
me about the success of WordPress in the publishing space, Newspack
is probably one of the first three organizations I point to and say, Hey,
these guys are doing awesome work.
Matt: Are there other, who are the others, that you could share?
Steve: Oh, well, there's, there's Newspack.
There is, a small, a fairly small, almost like one man
company called Paywall Project.
He's connected to LeakyPaywall, a plugin that does paywalls for, for
magazines and just very quietly,
just on his own almost, he's managed to get several hundred small newspapers
onto his platform and there's a, another platform called LEED, L E D E, that
spun out of a big agency called Allie.
And they've done really some interesting work with some new publishers.
There's one called, Defector, which is a big sports publisher spun out
of, it was called Deadspin originally.
kind of, yeah, related to the Gawker.
The
Matt: Yep.
Steve: space.
so Lead is a kind of spin off of Ali, and they're working
on some fascinating publishing projects, all based on WordPress.
A lot of them happen to be owned by the journalists, which is a really nice spin.
Matt: Yeah.
Based on what you've seen in, the bigger publishing space or even the
enterprise space, what's your experience with customers saying no to WordPress?
We don't want WordPress because what is their reasoning?
Steve: They need simpler.
Matt: Hmm.
Steve: things The people that go away from WordPress tend to be more like
the small one person sites that would prefer to go maybe substack or ghost
Matt: Yeah.
Steve: I I don't hear too much of the cannibalization of the at the top end
you've got organizations like WordPress VIP around who They're more than capable
of Taking care of the high end kinds If there is people eating WordPress is lunch.
It's definitely at the, at the lower end, someone that wants to send out
a newsletter blast once a once a week
Matt: Right.
Beehive, substack, you know, that kind of thing.
probably kit, MailChimp, like, you know, people who are just like, Eh,
I just need this kind of solution.
Yeah.
Steve: the recommendation features built in as well.
if you're on a WordPress site by yourself, you're not gonna benefit
from all those substack recommendations that, that nudge other people
to sign up for your newsletter.
Matt: Sure.
I usually have at least one, what I call, Strap on your seatbelt roller
coaster ride questions, and I'm going to give you one right now, and
I it's not even a direct question.
I'm gonna throw a bunch of stuff at you and then look for your feedback.
So, and there's many threads of thought here.
Let's I'm going to try to wrangle myself in on this one, too, but we're living
in a world, yeah, you might need to.
So we're living in a world where, I mean, WordPress is being challenged, right?
The community is being challenged.
you know, with everything happening with WP Engine and Automatic and Mullenweg.
WordPress is being challenged with, is this the best tool anymore?
It's, you know, air quotes, monolithic.
It's 20 plus years old.
there's all this new fangled AI stuff.
there's lots of people who question like, is open source even a viable thing?
Right?
Like I thought we had say in making this software.
Turns out we don't, fully, should we even be supporting this anymore?
There's all these things happening.
There's a very chaotic, catastrophic sphere happening right now,
in the world of WordPress and.
I'm looking for ways to, I guess, without picking sides, if that
can even be possible anymore, like how do you continue, how do we
continue to keep WordPress, going, how do we keep the platform going
and, and propping up open source?
And I was listening to another podcast, which is not even
in the WordPress space as AI.
It's a bit hypey, right?
He does some pretty clickbait.
I'm actually forgetting the name of the channel right now, but he's got
a few hundred thousand subscribers.
It's kind of hype clickbaity, but it's, it's good content.
And he had this really young kid on, I don't know, low twenties, 21, 22.
I don't know how old he was.
And he's talking about like building directories and how he
can make all this money, making, building these directory sites.
And he says, he's explaining how he does it, does all this
research, does all this thing.
And then he goes, I built this directory, the example directory that
he was talking about in WordPress.
And he goes, I know, it's a stupid decision to use WordPress, right?
And I'm listening to this, and I was just like, why?
So he's like, I'd rather be using like Framer or I could build this in Bolt.
And then the host is like, yeah, I can't believe you picked WordPress.
Like, why would you pick WordPress?
And I'm listening to it going.
No, it's actually the best platform to pick because what you all don't realize
is whenever you vote for your little AI project or your little side hustle
project, whenever you vote for something that's closed sourced or, you know, this
Integrated AI platform thing When your business that you're making money with
eventually actually costs you something and you're done with like the hype
moment of oh This thing's making me so much money because you haven't really
scaled it yet WordPress actually is the best choice because Things are detached.
It's an open source database.
It's an air quotes, open source front end.
You can move it to a different web hosting provider.
You can analyze your database and optimize it.
You have a user login system.
You can have theming and I know it's not beautiful and I know there's
a learning curve, but in fact, you can pick it apart, move things
around and it is a great solution.
It's just not sexy.
And that's the world we're living in.
I think, with WordPress.
Should we be doing this thing?
There's chaos in the community.
Oh god, AI looks so alluring compared to WordPress.
What's your thoughts?
On that, on that grenade of thoughts I threw at
Steve: That sounds more like a justified rant than a question.
Matt: Yeah.
Bourbon.
Steve: two?
Lunch time.
Um, deep seek.
Like, we just had the, one of the best selling pitches for open source that we've
had in years just dropped on our laps that with the power of open source, thanks to
Facebook's decision for whatever ulterior motives they had behind it to open source
all their research through Lama, we have a product That is capable of competing with
far, far, far more expensive alternatives.
I mean, that's kind of what WordPress is empowering still, that, the
technology itself may be a little old, but the, the principles that
it stands for, are going to be valuable for many, many years to come.
I, I started my journey here in just pure PHP, then some Joomla, then some Drupal.
Then some WordPress and the throughput for all of those has been the value of
doing things in the open source way.
I, I, I've still got a, a little bit of a Joomla business that's still going.
a little bit of Drupal business that's still going.
WordPress, even if it was to take a precipitous decline tomorrow,
it would still be employing.
many thousands of people for years to come.
Matt: Yeah.
Steve: But perhaps the important thing is what you were saying in your
justified rant that these kids moving to to Webflow, moving to closed source
platforms, are losing something of value.
Matt: Yeah.
Steve: If they're building with JavaScript, for example, Great.
Go for it.
building with, if they're building with open source tools, I think
they'll find themselves with a better career, a better future, for themselves
and for their platforms, if, if they stick to the open source way.
Matt: Yeah.
Another debate that I have, With some folks, particularly Kevin, Kevin Geary,
is like the core, use case for, for WordPress, and I don't have an answer,
but I think, as you know, and as a lot of us who have been in the space
for so long, I mean, it started as a blogging tool And then, you know, Matt
and Automatic sort of picked up this torch of, democratizing publishing.
And I think that was the thing, the North Star, when, when
WordPress and blogs were cool.
Again, a lot of air quotes in this episode.
I'm throwing air quotes when blogs and WordPress were cool.
but I think it is oh, so important as a, as a, as an open source
tool to have an open source publishing tool like WordPress.
But I think we're also getting tugged in another direction where it's
like, Oh, but we want this great website builder tool too, right?
And I don't see those as equal, I don't see that as the same path, right?
I, I don't know how WordPress can be the best publishing tool, bloggers.
Editors, collaborators, but also the best website building tool.
I mean, I get it.
I get why.
I just don't know from like a product person perspective
like how both of those meet.
your thoughts on WordPress as like pure publishing tool,
pure website building tool.
How do these two merge or is it not as complicated as I'm thinking it to be?
Steve: Hmm.
I, I wonder if you take a step back seven years.
I mean, how old is Gutenberg now?
Gutenberg
Matt: think it's eight.
I think it's eight.
Steve: Okay.
I seem to remember at that time, the original, the time the, the project
was launched, we were looking at Weebly and Wix and Squarespace and all
their, their cool drag and drop tools.
I mean, It is useful for, for WordPress to have those in the core.
I, the, the, what's the word?
steel man.
I think the,
Matt: Mm.
Steve: the, like taking the opposite side seriously is that, the downside
to taking the Gutenberg approaches.
There's only so many volunteer hours, so many, contributor hours in the
day that you can't do everything in the core with a team of volunteers
plus a few paid helpers as well.
So perhaps this was too much of a big project to take on to, to try
and also, to try and compete with Weebly's and the Squarespace's of
the world with a volunteer team.
it Part of being an open source probably is realizing you have some limitations.
You're not,
Matt: Yeah.
Steve: like, how many billions of dollars are companies like Meta
throwing at the problem of AI?
whole rooms full of people making half a million or a million dollars a year.
so yeah, maybe the Steelman, way.
To, to think about the people that don't like Gutenberg or think it
was the wrong choice is should we be trying to make the best publishing tool
and the best website building tool?
Some of that should probably be left to third parties to, to the Elementors
and the Beaver Builders of the world.
Yes,
Matt: Yeah.
Yeah, I, I, I tend to agree.
It's one of the great things about open source.
That's why I don't want to see it.
You know, that's why it's, again, this is a challenging time.
you know, I feel like everything.
I'm normally half glass full kind of guy with tech most of the time, but I feel
like everything hangs in the balance quite literally with WordPress, like as
we wait for this, you know, lawsuit suits to happen with WP Engine and automatic
and, what does that spell like, you know, we were really exposed to, at
least I was, I don't know about everybody else in the room, but I was really
exposed to the truth behind wordpress.
org.
And that makes me, yeah.
Like pause for a moment as like one of the biggest distribution
point for free plugins.
what happens to that after this?
And, you know, it's, it's really hard, for me to, you know, just.
I can understand everyone's frustrations.
I'm frustrated, but also at the same time, it's like, man, look what
we've done in 20 years, even though if we weren't fully privy to all the
details, it's like, how do you, how do we positively keep this again?
I go back to like, I can't choose.
I don't know how to choose sides.
Don't want to choose sides.
I just want to positively move WordPress forward.
but you know, we're just in this moment where I don't know how that's technically
possible now that we've kind of learned.
org, structure, I guess, for lack of a better phrase.
it's a bit challenging, in my opinion.
Yeah.
Steve: it's a big moment for WordPress.
I'm old enough to have lived through.
A few of these for different projects.
I think maybe, not an exact, comparison, but we were very heavily involved
in Drupal when it went from, Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 and they basically
rewrote the thing top to bottom.
And it really.
Really, really blew up in a big way for the community.
That was the point where we left.
and I saw some research the other day that when it came to sites on
Drupal seven, more of them ended up on WordPress than ended up on Drupal eight.
Matt: Yeah.
Steve: Like literally an enormous chunk of the user base left
and went, like a real kind of.
Stop dead, think hard about things like this is breaking the community
almost to a point where things are not going to be the same afterwards.
And you look back now and Drupal's doing okay.
They, they weren't quite the same afterwards.
There was a shift and, I think a few months after, I'm trying to think
of the timeline, but Acquia ended up selling to private equity for a
billion dollars, you know, like huge money entered the ecosystem as well.
And things were different for sure.
There was a kind of a hard nosed realism, like we're doing this under
the eye of a private equity company.
but They've kept going.
A lot of the original people that believed heavily in open source are still there
in the Drupal community, still going.
there's still a, a community spirit.
There's still a lot of open source software being made.
the, the people that went through it and ended up a little.
A little greyer, maybe not quite as idealistic.
and so word, probably the question then is where is WordPress going
to be in three, four years?
Are we all going to be perhaps still here, but a little more cynical?
Matt: Yeah, I, I, I, probably, probably.
Yeah, I mean, I, I think, you know, we just want to, you know, and I,
I think now as the dust settles, it's like, just tell us the rules.
In fact, never had problems with, with the rules before, even though
they were very kind of loose.
and I had even, you know, vocally said over the years like, Hey, turn WordPress.
org into a traditional marketplace.
I mean, I think now we know why he couldn't, you know, but, You know,
put it, traditional marketplace, tax us, like, just give us the
lane we need to operate in.
There's nothing wrong with Automatic and Matt profiting,
profiting off of this stuff.
it's just, you know, it's just very unclear and you, this is like, year
after year, you just don't know where, where you lie on this stuff.
But, anyway, I don't want to end it on a negative note,
Steve: Glass half full.
It could, I mean, you think, you're saying, you're thinking it could be
more like, Shopify, like an open source version of Shopify, like, hey, this is
owned by a commercial company at the top.
Matt: yeah,
Steve: Shopify, this is our brand, we own the brand, no one,
no one ever argues about the trademark for Shopify, for example.
There's a marketplace, we take a cut, we run the thing, but in WordPress's
case, the difference is the code is all open source, and, I mean, that's kind
of a little bit how it is in Drupal.
That there is a billion dollar behemoth sitting at the top of the ecosystem.
from day one, Dreece has always been clear.
We own this.
Drupal is my baby.
I sit on the Drupal Foundation.
so clarity, I guess, is the thing you're looking for most, most of all.
Matt: yeah, yeah, that, that, I mean, that, that clarity.
And, again, this is why I'm a proponent for the, for the open source side of it
and, and, and why I want folks to not just like Nick, like negatively, talk about it.
Because, yeah, you know, I, no issue like, and I've been saying this,
on some other, podcasts as well as like make WordPress, if WordPress.
com has the better WordPress, fine.
Fine make make your better version of WordPress over there And then the
ecosystem will make their better version of WordPress through like your tools with
published press somebody might be using beaver builder That's their better version
and let the ecosystem survive and you know I'm not super doomsday where I think
all of a sudden WordPress won't be GPL anymore we won't have that stuff anymore
or that ability but You know certainly want to encourage You know, WordPress,
excuse me, automatic to survive and be profitable and do all the things and
maybe that'll make a happier mullinwag.
And then the rest of us can move on with our lives and, you know, there it is.
you'll see less word camps, you might see less community stuff because
now people form the pockets of things, but it's already happening.
So let's just, let's just get there.
That's it.
Steve: I mean, how, how many successful open source projects
are there that don't have a, a big corporate behemoth leading the way?
I mean, a lot of the JavaScript libraries are involved with
companies like, like Google.
it could be a fairly essential part of a successful open source
project is having an unashamedly money making part of things.
Um, but, yeah, a key portion of that is having very clear legal guidelines.
very clear commercial guidelines around it.
And, yeah, you're right.
Probably.
we don't know in the end whether the glass is going to be half full or half empty,
Matt: Sure.
Steve: look forward two, three years, we could still be stuck in sort of little.
Twitter spats or Reddit thread arguments with, with Matt throwing things out,
or there could be an adult in the room, hopefully Matt himself, to come
along and say, we're going to run our community along X, Y, and Z lines.
And, at the end of the day, I, I'm one of the co founders.
I run the, the corporate behemoth.
You follow X, Y, and Z and you like it or lump it.
Matt: Yeah.
That's Steve Burge.
That's steve at steveburge.
com.
Check out PublishPress.
check out all of the tools that Steve has.
Folks, definitely give Steve a follow.
Check out his tools, especially if you're a publisher or you
care about the publishing that you're doing with WordPress.
Steve, where else do you want folks to go to say thanks?
Steve: Oh, that's it.
head over to, to PublishPress, and keep up the great work, Matt.
I've, been following your podcasts and your Slack channel for years.
one good place to find me would be in the WP Minute Slack, where we hang
out and talk WordPress every day.
Matt: Yeah.
Yeah.
That's awesome stuff.
Thanks, Steve.
Thanks for hanging out today.
Steve: Cheers, Matt.