WordPress Shifts in industry news I am not a part of but enjoy gossiping about
I used to do a a lot of work using WordPress as a system. It's easy, cheap to build and maintain with, etc.
I do not anymore. This has nothing to do with WordPress. It was exclusively a "a few years ago I received the opportunity to bow out of the industry as a graphic designer in order to pursue a cocktail of art, fantasy, economy, and business"
I used to be a customer of Advanced Custom Fields. I am no longer, for the same reason as above, I am no longer a web developer. Their service was good to me and I enjoyed it tremendously while I had it.
I have therefore no stake in this game and thus no public opinion.
And yet I enjoy the drama of it all so here we are.
WordPress is forking.
Or maybe it isn't a fork.
The core, mesmerizing, (and I do not say this lightly) potentially civilization changing beauty of open source software is the ability to meet different, often diametrically opposing, priorities.
"Civilization-changing is kinda heavy language?"
via
No :)
A significant portion of the internet as we know it today is powered by WordPress. It has and will continue to shape the entire scope and scale of internet development for longer than anyone reading this will be alive -- for good and for ill.
WordPress was primarily a blogging system that could build websites as well. With the introduction of externally-based Advanced Custom Fields, it became a powerhouse web builder as well.
The short version: You could easily say "put this image / text / whatever here in the template."
It was a game changer to many smaller scale developers (hi) with a tiny staff. It allowed us (me + team) to grow much more powerful very quickly and very affordably.
When WP Engine was blocked from accessing WordPress.org, users were left wondering what the future holds for ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) an
Digging into the news further, there is / was chatter about pulling in the core functionality of ACF into WP's main system.
It brings an interesting point to the open source space.
And goes to my original points above.
If you make something open, how much control do you have over it? If you profit from it, how long can this last before it gets pulled into the core?
That is a risk as a developer -- you could potentially lose your business because it gets folded into the larger entity, but on the other hand, until that point, your reward was immediate accessibility to a market / system a million times larger than you, that you had previously no hand in building.
It is a tragedy of the commons.
I had long forgotten this phrase.
I'm familiar with the concept -- a public finite resource is at risk of overuse from all because it is available to all -- it largely joins with the core issue of economics itself -- how do you find balance with finite resources and infinite desires.
It is the nature of art on the internet.
Artists want to make art and it to be seen, they put it online. Audiences do not by nature owe them anything, the art is available to view for free, but without audience support, the art will stop or degrade in posting frequency.
More directly, to the WordPress sphere, what is the responsibility to the core system (thus other users)? What is the responsibility of the users to the core system?
Objectively speaking, building and maintaining a system like WordPress requires a lot of resources.
The open source nature allows for competing priorities to be served provided enough resources, because you can always say "I don't want to follow your path of ABC, I want to do BCD" and then do that.
The open source nature also allows you to say "I made a widget, it costs $100/year"
But the core can say "Hm. That would make our system stronger. Yoink. Now it's ours and is free."
Then you have a market race to push to build the better whatever.
I...
...do not have answers.
To any of this.
I am left realizing.
It feels like macroeconomics and personal economics grinding against each other in a way that is traditionally seen across countries (if not the world) and decades (if not centuries) -- but in this instance, it's a much smaller scale (kinda? WP powers a lot of the internet and influences a significant portion of what it doesn't power).
And weeks and months.
Instead of decades and centuries.
This is a fun piece of bone to chew on.
I freely admit it is fun exclusively because I am not involved. If I were, it would be fucking nerve wracking.
